Multisensor Microwave Sea-Ice Classification

• Main Author: Remund, Quinn P.
• Format: Text
• Language: unknown
• Published: DigitalCommons@USU 1999
• Subjects: Sea ice
• Online Access: https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/spacegrant/1999/Session2/2; https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1294&context=spacegrant

Understanding the polar ice regimes is fundamental to the understanding of global climate and other geophysical processes. Sea ice characteristics can be grouped into a number of .general sea ice classes. Multisensor data from NSCAT, ERS-2, and SSM/I is reconstructed into enhanced resolution imagery for use in ice type classification. The resulting 12-dimensional data set is linearly transformed through principal component analysis to reduce data dimensionality and noise levels. An iterative statistical data segmentation algorithm is developed using maximum a pasteriori techniques. The conditional probability distributions of observed vectors given the ice type are assumed to be Gaussian. The cluster centroids, covariance matrices, and a priori ·distributions are estimated from the classification of a previous temporal image set. An initial classification is produced using centroid training data and a weighted nearest neighbor classifier. Though validation is limited, the algorithm results in an ice classi1ication which is subjectively superior to a conventional k-means approach.