Operational algorithm for ice/water classification on dual-polarized RADARSAT-2 images
Abstract. Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data from RADARSAT-2 (RS2) taken in dual-polarization mode provide additional information for discriminating sea ice and open water compared to single-polarization data. We have developed a fully automatic algorithm to distinguish between open water (rough/calm) and sea ice based on dual-polarized RS2 SAR images. Several technical problems inherent in RS2 data were solved on the pre-processing stage including thermal noise reduction in HV-polarization channel and correction of angular backscatter dependency on HH-polarization. Texture features are used as additional information for supervised image classification based on Support Vector Machines (SVM) approach. The main regions of interest are the ice-covered seas between Greenland and Franz Josef Land. The algorithm has been trained using 24 RS2 scenes acquired during winter months in 2011 and 2012, and validated against the manually derived ice chart product from the Norwegian Meteorological Institute. Between 2013 and 2015, 2705 RS2 scenes have been utilised for validation and the average classification accuracy has been found to be 91 ± 4 %.