A SEMI-AUTOMATIC APPROACH FOR ESTIMATING NEAR SURFACE INTERNAL LAYERS FROM SNOW 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: Index Terms — Radar Image Processing; Near Surface Internal Layers; Antarc*; Antarctica
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.363.8969; http://grids.ucs.indiana.edu/ptliupages/publications/IGARSSMitchellv2.pdf

The near surface layer signatures in polar firn are preserved from the glaciological behaviors of past climate and are important to understanding the rapidly changing polar ice sheets. Identifying and tracing near surface internal layers in snow radar echograms can be used to produce high-resolution accumulation maps. Layers, however, are manually traced in large data volumes requiring time-consuming, dense handselection and interpolation between sections. We have developed an approach for semi-automatically estimating near surface internal layers in snow radar echograms acquired from Antarctica. Our solution utilizes an active contour model (called snakes) to find high-intensity edges likely to correspond to layer boundaries, while simultaneously imposing constraints on smoothness of layer depth and parallelism among layers.