Abstract:The interferometric coherence map is derived from the crosscorrelation of two registered synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images. It can give additional information complementary to the intensity image, or act as an independent information source in many applications. Compared to the plenty of work on SAR intensity statistics, there are quite fewer researches on the statistical characters of interferometric SAR (InSAR) coherence. And to our knowledge, all of the existing work that related to InSAR coherence statistics, models the coherence with Gaussian distribution with no discrimination on data resolutions or scene types. Our main contribution is the investigation on the accuracies of several typical models for high resolution coherence statistics over urban areas. We select three typical land classes including trees, buildings, and shadow, as the representatives of urban areas. And different models including Gaussian, Weibull, Rayleigh, Nakagami and Beta are evaluated. Experiment results on TanDEMX data illustrate that the Beta model reveals a better performance than other distributions. Finally, the Beta model is used in the detection of buildings.