Classification of Sea Ice Types in Sentinel-1 SAR Data Using Convolutional Neural Networks

A new algorithm for classification of sea ice types on Sentinel-1 Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) data using a convolutional neural network (CNN) is presented. The CNN is trained on reference ice charts produced by human experts and compared with an existing machine learning algorithm based on textur...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Remote Sensing
Main Authors: Hugo Boulze, Anton Korosov, Julien Brajard
Format: Text
Language:English
Published: Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute 2020
Subjects:
convolutional neural network
Sentinel-1
SAR
sea ice type
ice chart
Arctic
Sea ice
Online Access:https://doi.org/10.3390/rs12132165
Description
Summary:A new algorithm for classification of sea ice types on Sentinel-1 Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) data using a convolutional neural network (CNN) is presented. The CNN is trained on reference ice charts produced by human experts and compared with an existing machine learning algorithm based on texture features and random forest classifier. The CNN is trained on two datasets in 2018 and 2020 for retrieval of four classes: ice free, young ice, first-year ice and old ice. The accuracy of our classification is 90.5% for the 2018-dataset and 91.6% for the 2020-dataset. The uncertainty is a bit higher for young ice (85%/76% accuracy in 2018/2020) and first-year ice (86%/84% accuracy in 2018/2020). Our algorithm outperforms the existing random forest product for each ice type. It has also proved to be more efficient in computing time and less sensitive to the noise in SAR data. The code is publicly available.

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