The K-distribution for modeling the envelope amplitude of a backscattered signal

In this paper, we present an application of the K-distribution for modeling the amplitude of a backscattered signal in a nondestructive evaluation (NDE) setting, discuss procedures for resolving well-known computational difficulties associated with obtaining maximum likelihood estimates (MLE), and present a comparison with other candidate models for the distribution of the maximum of an unknown number of independent, identically distributed (iid) random variables.