Analysis of Multilook Polarimetric Radar Data with the Mellin Transform

In this paper we propose to use a matrix-variate Mellin transform in the statistical analysis of multilook polarimetric radar data. The domain of the transform integral is the cone of complex positive definite matrices, which allows for transformation of the sample covariance matrix distributions used to model multilook polarimetric radar data. Based on the matrix-variate Mellin transform, an alternative characteristic function is defined, from which we can retrieve a new kind of matrix log-moments and log-cumulants. We show that the matrix log-cumulants are of great value to the analysis of polarimetric radar data, and can be used to derive low bias and variance estimators for the distribution parameters.