With the increase of resolution, effective characterization of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) image becomes one of the most critical problems in many earth observation applications. Inspired by deep learning and probability mixture models, a generalized Gamma deep belief network (g Γ-DBN) is proposed for SAR image statistical modeling and land-cover classification in this work. Specifically, a generalized Gamma-Bernoulli restricted Boltzmann machine (gΓB-RBM) is proposed to capture high-order statistical characterizes from SAR images after introducing the generalized Gamma distribution. After stacking the g Γ B-RBM and several standard binary RBMs in a hierarchical manner, a gΓ-DBN is constructed to learn high-level representation of different SAR land-covers. Finally, a discriminative neural network is constructed by adding an additional predict layer for different land-covers over the constructed deep structure. Performance of the proposed approach is evaluated via several experiments on some high-resolution SAR image patch sets and two large-scale scenes which are captured by ALOS PALSAR-2 and COSMO-SkyMed satellites respectively.