Sunglitter in oceanic remote detection

One of the problems in oceanic remote sensing is how to reliably detect or distinguish a signal of interest from the random sources of noise arising in both the environment and the sensor. For example, under what conditions can a small capsized boat be detected in high-altitude optical imagery (e.g., by sight from an airplane) in the presence sunglitter and subsurface backscattering. In such an application, the design of the optimal signal-processing algorithm and the evaluation of its performance depend critically upon in the statistics of the noise in the sensing process. Diffuse optical noise can usually be adequately modeled as normally distributed. But sunglitter is known to be extremely non-normal and, therefore, its statistical characterization as a function of the viewing geometry, wind speed, and sensor resolution are critical to the design of an effective detector.