A Complete Process For Shipborne Sea-Ice Field Analysis Using Machine Vision

A sensor instrumentation and an automated process are proposed for sea-ice field analysis using ship mounted machine vision cameras with the help of inertial and satellite positioning sensors. The proposed process enables automated acquisition of sea-ice concentration, floes size and distribution. T...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:IFAC-PapersOnLine
Main Authors: Sandru, Andrei, Hyyti, Heikki, Visala, Arto, Kujala, Pentti
Other Authors: National Land Survey of Finland, Maanmittauslaitos
Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
Language:English
Published: Elsevier 2021
Subjects:
IMU
Online Access:http://hdl.handle.net/10138/329305
Description
Summary:A sensor instrumentation and an automated process are proposed for sea-ice field analysis using ship mounted machine vision cameras with the help of inertial and satellite positioning sensors. The proposed process enables automated acquisition of sea-ice concentration, floes size and distribution. The process contains pre-processing steps such as sensor calibration, distortion removal, orthorectification of image data, and data extraction steps such as sea-ice floe clustering, detection, and analysis. In addition, we improve the state of the art of floe clustering and detection, by using an enhanced version of the k-means algorithm and the blue colour channel for increased contrast in ice detection. Comparing to manual visual observations, the proposed method gives significantly more detailed and frequent data about the size and distribution of individual floes. Through our initial experiments in pack ice conditions, the proposed system has proved to be able to segment most of the individual floes and estimate their size and area.