The Hotelling-Lawley trace statistic for change detection in polarimetric SAR data under the complex Wishart distribution

Citation

Akbari V, Anfinsen SN, Doulgeris AP & Eltoft T (2014) The Hotelling-Lawley trace statistic for change detection in polarimetric SAR data under the complex Wishart distribution. In: IGARSS 2013 - 2013 IEEE International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium, Melbourne, Australia, 21.07.2013-26.07.2013. New York: IEEE. https://doi.org/10.1109/igarss.2013.6723750

Abstract
In this paper we propose a new test statistic for unsupervised change detection in polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (Pol-SAR) data. We work with multilook complex (MLC) covariance matrix data, whose underlying model is assumed to be the scaled complex Wishart distribution. We use the complex kind Hotelling-Lawley (HL) trace statistic for measuring the similarity of two covariance matrices. The sampling distribution of the HL trace is approximated by a Fisher-Snedecor distribution, which is used to define the significance level of a constant false alarm rate change detector. The performance of the proposed method is tested on simulated and real PolSAR data sets and compared to the likelihood ratio test statistic.

People

Dr Vahid Akbari

Lect in Artificial Intelligence/Data Sci, Computing Science and Mathematics - Division