Polarimetric SAR change detection with the complex hotelling-lawley trace statistic

In this paper, we propose a new test statistic for unsupervised change detection in polarimetric radar images. We work with multilook complex covariance matrix data, whose underlying model is assumed to be the scaled complex Wishart distribution. We use the complex-kind Hotelling–Lawley trace (HLT) statistic for measuring the similarity of two covariance matrices. The distribution of the HLT statistic is approximated by a Fisher–Snedecor distribution, which is used to define the significance level of a false alarm rate regulated change detector. Experiments on simulated and real PolSAR data sets demonstrate that the proposed change detection method gives detection rates and error rates that are comparable with the generalized likelihood ratio test.