Iterative Maximum Likelihood and Outlier-robust Bipercentile Estimation of Parameters of Compound-Gaussian Clutter With Inverse Gaussian Texture

Abstract

Compound-Gaussian model with the inverse Gaussian texture (IG–CG) is recognized to be one of the best models to characterize high-resolution sea clutter at low grazing angles. The model parameters are often estimated by the second- and fourth-order amplitude sample moments, which are of low precision and easily interfered by outliers of high power such as returns of ships and reefs and sea spikes. In this letter, an iterative maximum likelihood (ML) estimator and an outlier-robust bipercentile estimator are proposed and are compared with the moment-based estimator. The experimental results show that the iterative ML estimator is better in performance than the moment-based estimator when samples are without outliers and the bipercentile estimator behaves better when samples contain a small number of outliers.