Improvement of Sea Ice Drift Extraction Based on Feature Tracking from C-SAR/01 Imagery

• Published in: IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Applied Earth Observations and Remote Sensing
• Main Authors: Yanli Yang, Tao Xie, Chengzhi Sun, Chao Wang, Jian Li, Xuehong Zhang
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 2024
• Subjects: 1-meter C-SAR 01(C-SAR/01); Arctic; feature tracking (FT); oriented fast and rotated brief (ORB); sea ice drift; synthetic aperture radar (SAR); Ocean engineering; TC1501-1800; Geophysics. Cosmic physics; QC801-809; Sea ice
• Online Access: https://doi.org/10.1109/JSTARS.2024.3403919; https://doaj.org/article/d95cc4c7d2e8492abfeb443264f2e114

In this study, the extraction of sea ice drift from imagery captured by the 1-meter C-SAR 01 satellite (C-SAR/01) was facilitated utilizing the oriented fast and rotated brief algorithm within the feature tracking procedure, thus addressing the previously unexplored area of sea ice drift extraction using C-SAR/01 imagery. The retained keypoints and nearest neighbor distance ratio test for sea ice drift extracted from C-SAR/01 imagery were compared, indicating high reliability with 300 000 and 0.75, respectively. In addition, the local outlier factor algorithm is proposed in this article, which can effectively remove erroneous sea ice drift vectors. The sea ice drift extracted from C-SAR/01 was validated against manually extracted sea ice drift, revealing an uncertainty of 0.271 cm/s in speed and 8.331° in direction. Furthermore, the sea ice drift obtained from the algorithm in this study, when compared with sea ice drift from IABP buoys, exhibits high accuracy, reflecting the robustness of the algorithm.