Non-zero mean statistical models for urban area polarization SAR images

Urban area man-made target detection based on SAR images has been a challenging field for years due to the complicated scattering mechanisms of dense buildings and the poor visual quality of SAR images caused by speckle noises. To overcome the effect of speckle noise, a substantial portion of SAR image processing methods are based on statistical characteristics. In this paper, the importance of using non-zero mean models is discussed in the experiments, and two statistical models are proposed for polarization SAR image processing. Moreover, a non-zero mean index is invented to test the scattering determinacy level. This work will be very helpful for the improvement of urban area information extraction based on fully polarized SAR images.