An Approach to Estimating Bedrock and Surfaces Layers in Polar Radar Imagery

• Main Authors: Jerome E. Mitchell, David J. Cr, Geoffrey C. Fox, John D. Paden
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Subjects: Antarc*; Antarctica; Ice Sheet
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.300.6087; http://grids.ucs.indiana.edu/ptliupages/publications/2013 SPIE Remote Sensing.pdf

This work estimates surface and bedrock layers from radar imagery acquired in Antarctica. Identifying and accurately selecting the surface and bedrock provides ice sheet thickness measurements, which are important for the study of ice sheets, their volume, and how they may contribute to global climate change. The time-consuming, manual approach, however, requires sparse hand-selection of surface and bedrock interfaces by several domain experts and interpolation between selections to save time. Given the petabytes of radar imagery acquired in the past and its growth each year, estimating bedrock and surface boundaries are necessary to provide results to the scientific community in a timely manner. We have developed an active contours method (called level sets [1]) for estimating surface and bedrock layers in polar radar imagery. For each layer, a 2D embedding functions