estimating the alpha-stable distribution parameters for ship detection in polarimetric sar images

in synthetic aperture radar (sar) imagery, ship-sea contrast can be significantly improved when the polarimetric information is used, compared with information from a single channel sar. the constant false alarm rate (cfar) detection algorithm based on the alpha-stable (as) distribution model is a descent method for ship detection in sea. the most important step in this method is the parameter estimation of the as probability density function for which the method of log-cumulants (molc) parameter estimation is proposed and utilized in this study. evaluation results of the proposed method on two l- and c-band polarimetric sar (polsar) datasets which are acquired by airsar and radarsat-2 sensors confirm the accuracy of the method. experimental results show that the best results of detection maps are achieved when the polarimetric span and entropy data are used where a high detection accuracy in the latter cases are along with a low number of false alarms.