Log-cumulants of the finite mixture model and their application to statistical analysis of fully polarimetric UAVSAR data

Abstract

Since its first flight in 2007, the UAVSAR instrument of NASA has acquired a large number of fully Polarimetric SAR (PolSAR) data in very high spatial resolution. It is possible to observe small spatial features in this type of data, offering the opportunity to explore structures in the images. In general, the structured scenes would present multimodal or spiky histograms. The finite mixture model has great advantages in modeling data with irregular histograms. In this paper, a type of important statistics called log-cumulants, which could be used to design parameter estimator or goodness-of-fit tests, are derived for the finite mixture model. They are compared with log-cumulants of the texture models. The results are adopted to UAVSAR data analysis to determine which model is better for different land types.