| Summary: | ©1999 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. However, permission to reprint/republish this material for advertising or promotional purposes or for creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or to reuse any copyrighted component of this work in other works must be obtained from the IEEE. In this paper we define the concept of information fusion and show how we used it to estimate summer sea ice concentration in the marginal ice zone (MIZ) from single-channel SAR satellite imagery, We used data about melt stage, wind speed, and surface temperature to generate temporally-accumulated information, and fused this information with the SAR image, resulting in an interpretation of summer MIZ imagery, We also used the results of previous classifications of the same area to guide and correct future interpretations, thus fusing historical information with imagery and nonimagery data. We chose to study the summer MIZ since summer melt conditions cause classification based upon backscatter intensity to fail, as the backscatter of open water, thin ice, first-year ice, and multiyear ice overlap to a large degree. This makes it necessary to fuse various information and data to achieve proper segmentation and automated classification of the image. Our results were evaluated qualitatively and showed that our approach produces very good ice concentration estimates in the summer MIZ.
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