AUTOMATIC ICE THICKNESS ESTIMATION IN RADAR IMAGERY BASED ON CHARGED PARTICLES CONCEPT

Abstract

Accelerated loss of ice from Greenland and Antarctica has been observed in recent decades. Ice thickness is a key factor in making predictions about the future of massive ice reservoirs and can be estimated by calculating the exact location of the ice surface and bottom in radar imagery. Identifying the locations of ice boundaries is typically performed manually which is a very time consuming procedure. Here we propose a novel approach which automatically detects the complex topology of ice surface and bottom boundaries based on charged particle concept. Here we first applied anisotropic diffusion to remove the noise and enhance the image. At the second step, we detected the contours in the image based on Coulomb's electrostatic law and the assumption that each pixel is an electrically charged particle. The final ice surface and bottom are detected based on the projection profile of the contours. The results are evaluated on a large dataset of airborne radar imagery collected during IceBridge mission over Antarctica and show promising results with respect to hand-labeled ground truth.