SAR Remote Sensing Algorithms for Automated Extraction of Sea Ice Ridges and Leads.
Abstract
Sea ice is of fundamental importance in weather, climate and other geophysical processes. It is also an important factor for naval operations in the polar regions, in particular regarding transport of personnel and material in regions where sea ice is likely to be found and assessment and prediction of acoustic environments in polar regions. Ridges (and keels) in sea ice are important because they provide a rougher surface and thus a higher drag coefficient for both atmospheric winds and ocean currents. This impacts sea ice motion. In addition ridges and keels can impact travel on the ice and operations under the ice since they constitute barriers to easy surface travel over the ice and a hazard to operations in the water column just under the surface. Because sea ice has a large geographic extent and short time scale for variability synthetic aperture radar (SAR) is a valuable technique in studying sea ice, particularly since images can be collected through clouds and at night. SAR information on sea ice is available from several satellites (ERS-1 & 2, JERS-1 and Radarsat). Automated interpretation techniques are required because of the large number and high information content of the SAR images becoming available. Here we report research on automated-computer- based techniques for such interpretation. The general problem that we face is to extract geophysical information from one or more SAR images. The work reported here concerns automated extraction of ridges and leads in sea ice. This amounts to segmentation of a sea ice surface into ice, ridges and leads. The principle approach under this grant is to use genetic algorithms to implement the segmentation.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Aug 01, 1997
- Accession Number
- ADA330060
Entities
People
- John F. Vesecky
Organizations
- University of Michigan