Experimental analysis of sea clutter using airborne circular scanning SAR in medium grazing angle

The theoretical statistical model of sea clutter is a key issue for maritime surveillance. In recent years, the statistical model of sea clutter has attracted much attention to design the detector well. Meanwhile, the circular scanning synthetic aperture radar (SAR) has been applied to wide surveillance of the sea surface. Therefore, the paper analyzes the validity of available sea clutter models for range Doppler images from different scan angles for moderate sea state in the medium grazing angle. The parameter estimation method for different distribution models employs the method of logarithmic cumulant (MoLC) based on Mellin transform uniformly. By the analysis of the fitting performance between the histogram of real data and the amplitude probability density function (PDF) of empirical distribution models and the goodness-of-fit (GoF) test for real data from different scan angles, it is indicated the generalized K (GK) distribution with generalized Gamma texture distribution can fit the sea clutter well for different scan angles in the medium grazing angle.