High resolution motion estimation of sea ice using an implicit quad-tree approach

• Main Authors: M. Thomas, C. A. Geiger, C. Kambhamettu
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Published: 2007
• Subjects: KEY WORDS; RADARSAT; motion estimation; Quadtree decomposition; phase correlation; line integral convolution ABSTRACT; Sea ice
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.125.6948; http://vims.cis.udel.edu/~mani/publications/ISPRSpaper_Thomas.pdf

In this paper we estimate the motion between time-lagged Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) image pairs via an implicit quad-tree scheme. The algorithm provides a means to estimate motion at a spatial resolution that is an order of magnitude greater than the currently available data products. Since the motion is extracted from the image data iteratively, the estimated field provides an accurate picture of the underlying discontinuous motion. Experimental tests indicate that the algorithm is also computationally efficient. This is extremely valuable when attempting to localize leads and ridges that are created in sea ice. 1