IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON GEOSCIENCE AND REMOTE SENSING 1 Entropy-based Statistical Analysis of PolSAR Data

Abstract—Images obtained from coherent illumination pro-cesses are contaminated with speckle noise, with polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (PolSAR) imagery as a prominent example. With an adequacy widely attested in the literature, the scaled complex Wishart distribution is an acceptable model for PolSAR data. In this perspective, we derive analytic expressions for the Shannon, Rényi, and restricted Tsallis entropies under this model. Relationships between the derived measures and the parameters of the scaled Wishart law (i.e., the equivalent number of looks and the covariance matrix) are discussed. In addition, we obtain the asymptotic variances of the Shannon and Rényi entropies when replacing distribution parameters by maximum likelihood estimators. As a consequence, confidence intervals based on these two entropies are also derived and proposed as new ways of capturing contrast. New hypothesis tests are additionally proposed using these results, and their performance is assessed using simulated and real data. In general terms, the test based on the Shannon entropy outperforms those based on Rényi’s. Index Terms—Information theory, SAR polarimetry, contrast measures. I