Imaging Sea Ice Structure by Remote Sensing Sensors

Abstract

This paper will investigate how new developments in remote sensing and sensor technologies can be applied to image the structure of the sea ice surface. Both segmentation of multipolarimetric synthetic aperture radar images and strategies for the analyses of polarimetric SAR data of sea ice are addressed. The analysis is based on a Radarsat 2 PolSAR scene of from the Fram Strait in September 2011. It is shown that the segmentation algorithm clearly enables segmentation of sea ice into proper segments. The paper also includes some preliminary results from a very new model-based polarimetric decomposition approach, which uses higher-order statistics to estimate the model parameters. The results are very promising for sea ice applications. Finally, using data collected in the Fram Strait with an RPAS flown out from the Norwegian Coast Guard Vessel KV Svalbard in spring 2013, it is shown that the sea ice surface structure may be adequately imaged using stereoscopic optical imaging from an RPAS platform.