Stable Parameter Estimation of Compound Wishart Distribution for Polarimetric SAR Data Modeling

This paper investigates the parameter estimation of compound Wishart distribution for statistical modeling of polarimetric synthetic aperture radar data. We show that the recently proposed method of matrix log-cumulant may lead to non-invertible equations and cause unstable performances. In order to overcome such difficulty, we proposed a Bayesian-based method to re-estimate the log-cumulants. Simulation experiment demonstrates that the proposed algorithm provides both improved and stabler results. Finally, we present an application of the new method for texture analysis of the Germany F-SAR polarimetric data