Segmentation Of Radarsat 2 Dual Polarization Sea Ice Imagery

Download or read book Segmentation of RADARSAT-2 Dual-polarization Sea Ice Imagery written by Peter Yu and published by . This book was released on 2009 with total page 93 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The mapping of sea ice is an important task for understanding global climate and for safe shipping. Currently, sea ice maps are created by human analysts with the help of remote sensing imagery, including synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imagery. While the maps are generally correct, they can be somewhat subjective and do not have pixel-level resolution due to the time consuming nature of manual segmentation. Therefore, automated sea ice mapping algorithms such as the multivariate iterative region growing with semantics (MIRGS) sea ice image segmentation algorithm are needed. MIRGS was designed to work with one-channel single-polarization SAR imagery from the RADARSAT-1 satellite. The launch of RADARSAT-2 has made available two-channel dual-polarization SAR imagery for the purposes of sea ice mapping. Dual-polarization imagery provides more information for distinguishing ice types, and one of the channels is less sensitive to changes in the backscatter caused by the SAR incidence angle parameter. In the past, this change in backscatter due to the incidence angle was a key limitation that prevented automatic segmentation of full SAR scenes. This thesis investigates techniques to make use of the dual-polarization data in MIRGS.