Effective SAR sea ice image segmentation and touch floe separation using a combined multi-stage approach

• Published in: 2015 IEEE International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium (IGARSS)
• Main Authors: Ren, Jinchang, Hwang, Byongjun, Murray, Paul, Sakhalkar, Soumitra, McCormack, Samuel
• Format: Book Part
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 2015
• Subjects: Electrical engineering. Electronics Nuclear engineering; Arctic; Sea ice
• Online Access: https://strathprints.strath.ac.uk/54441/; https://strathprints.strath.ac.uk/54441/1/Ren_etal_IEEE_IGRSS_2015_Effective_SAR_sea_lice_image_segmentation_and_touch_floe_separation.pdf; https://doi.org/10.1109/IGARSS.2015.7325947

Accurate sea-ice segmentation from satellite synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images plays an important role for understanding the interactions between sea-ice, ocean and atmosphere in the Arctic. Processing sea-ice SAR images are challenging due to poor spatial resolution and severe speckle noise. In this paper, we present a multi-stage method for the sea-ice SAR image segmentation, which includes edge-preserved filtering for pre-processing, k-means clustering for segmentation and conditional morphology filtering for post-processing. As such, the effect of noise has been suppressed and the under-segmented regions are successfully corrected.