Quantitative statistical assessment of conditional models for synthetic aperture radar

Many applications of object recognition in the presence of pose uncertainty rely on statistical models-conditioned on pose-for observations. The image statistics of three-dimensional (3-D) objects are often assumed to belong to a family of distributions with unknown model parameters that vary with one or more continuous-valued pose parameters. Many methods for statistical model assessment, for example the tests of Kolmogorov-Smirnov and K. Pearson, require that all model parameters be fully specified or that sample sizes be large. Assessing pose-dependent models from a finite number of observations over a variety of poses can violate these requirements. However, a large number of small samples, corresponding to unique combinations of object, pose, and pixel location, are often available. We develop methods for model testing which assume a large number of small samples and apply them to the comparison of three models for synthetic aperture radar images of 3-D objects with varying pose. Each model is directly related to the Gaussian distribution and is assessed both in terms of goodness-of-fit and underlying model assumptions, such as independence, known mean, and homoscedasticity. Test results are presented in terms of the functional relationship between a given significance level and the percentage of samples that wold fail a test at that level.