Publication Date:
2017-07-28
Description:
For navigation in Baltic Sea ice during winter season, parameters such as ice edge, ice concentration, ice thickness, ice drift and degree of ridging are usually reported daily in the manually prepared Ice Charts, which provide icebreakers essential information for route optimization and fuel calculations. However, manual ice charting requires long analysis times and detailed analysis is not possible for large scale maps (e.g. Arctic Ocean). Here, we propose a method for automatic estimation of degree of ridging density in the Baltic Sea region, based on RADARSAT-2 C-band dual-polarized (HH/HV channels) SAR texture features and the sea ice concentration information extracted from the Finnish Ice Charts. The SAR images were first segmented and then several texture features were extracted for each
segment. Using the Random Forest classification, we classified them into four classes of ridging intensity and compared them to the reference data extracted from the digitized Ice Charts. The overall agreement between the ice chart based degree of ice ridging (DIR) and the automated results varied monthly, being 83 %, 63 % and 81 % in January, February and March 2013, respectively. The correspondence between the degree of ice riding of the manual Ice Charts and the actual ridge density was good when this issue was studied based on an extensive field campaign data in March 2011.
Print ISSN:
1994-0432
Electronic ISSN:
1994-0440
Topics:
Geography
,
Geosciences
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