A multi-level SAR sea ice image classification method by incorporating egg-code-based expert knowledge

With the development of remote sensing technology, the spatial resolution, spectral resolution and time resolution of remote sensing data is greatly improved. How to efficiently process and interpret the massive high resolution remote sensing image data for ground objects, which with spatial geometry and texture information, has become the focus and difficulty in the field of remote sensing research. An object oriented and rule of the classification method of remote sensing data has presents in this paper. Through the discovery and mining the rich knowledge of spectrum and spatial characteristics of high-resolution remote sensing image, establish a multi-level network image object segmentation and classification structure of remote sensing image to achieve accurate and fast ground targets classification and accuracy assessment. Based on worldview-2 image data in the Zangnan area as a study object, using the object-oriented image classification method and rules to verify the experiment which is combination of the mean variance method, the maximum area method and the accuracy comparison to analysis, selected three kinds of optimal segmentation scale and established a multi-level image object network hierarchy for image classification experiments. The results show that the objectoriented rules classification method to classify the high resolution images, enabling the high resolution image classification results similar to the visual interpretation of the results and has higher classification accuracy. The overall accuracy and Kappa coefficient of the object-oriented rules classification method were 97.38%, 0.9673; compared with object-oriented SVM method, respectively higher than 6.23%, 0.078; compared with object-oriented KNN method, respectively more than 7.96%, 0.0996. The extraction precision and user accuracy of the building compared with object-oriented SVM method, respectively higher than 18.39%, 3.98%, respectively better than the object-oriented KNN method 21.27%, 14.97%.

Download Full-text

Sea Ice Image Classification Based on Heterogeneous Data Fusion and Deep Learning

Remote Sensing ◽

10.3390/rs13040592 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 13 (4) ◽

pp. 592

Author(s):

Yanling Han ◽

Yekun Liu ◽

Zhonghua Hong ◽

Yun Zhang ◽

Shuhu Yang ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Feature Extraction ◽

Deep Learning ◽

Data Fusion ◽

Sea Ice ◽

Image Classification ◽

Heterogeneous Data ◽

Optical Data ◽

Spectral Information ◽

Texture Information ◽

Multi Level

Sea ice is one of the typical causes of marine disasters. Sea ice image classification is an important component of sea ice detection. Optical data contain rich spectral information, but they do not allow one to easily distinguish between ground objects with a similar spectrum and foreign objects with the same spectrum. Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data contain rich texture information, but the data usually have a single source. The limitation of single-source data is that they do not allow for further improvements of the accuracy of remote sensing sea ice classification. In this paper, we propose a method for sea ice image classification based on deep learning and heterogeneous data fusion. Utilizing the advantages of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) in terms of depth feature extraction, we designed a deep learning network structure for SAR and optical images and achieve sea ice image classification through feature extraction and a feature-level fusion of heterogeneous data. For the SAR images, the improved spatial pyramid pooling (SPP) network was used and texture information on sea ice at different scales was extracted by depth. For the optical data, multi-level feature information on sea ice such as spatial and spectral information on different types of sea ice was extracted through a path aggregation network (PANet), which enabled low-level features to be fully utilized due to the gradual feature extraction of the convolution neural network. In order to verify the effectiveness of the method, two sets of heterogeneous sentinel satellite data were used for sea ice classification in the Hudson Bay area. The experimental results show that compared with the typical image classification methods and other heterogeneous data fusion methods, the method proposed in this paper fully integrates multi-scale and multi-level texture and spectral information from heterogeneous data and achieves a better classification effect (96.61%, 95.69%).

Download Full-text

Cross-platform application of a sea ice classification method considering incident angle dependency of backscatter intensity and its use in separating level and deformed ice

10.5194/tc-2021-119 ◽

2021 ◽

Author(s):

Wenkai Guo ◽

Polona Itkin ◽

Johannes Lohse ◽

Malin Johansson ◽

Anthony Paul Doulgeris

Keyword(s):

Sea Ice ◽

Expert Knowledge ◽

Incident Angle ◽

Classification Method ◽

Backscatter Intensity ◽

Cross Platform ◽

Sar Data ◽

The Cross ◽

Training Sets

Abstract. Wide-swath C-band synthetic aperture radar (SAR) has been used for sea ice classification and estimates of sea ice drift and deformation since it first became widely available in the 1990s. Here, we examine the potential to distinguish surface features created by sea ice deformation using ice type classification of SAR data. To perform this task with extended spatial and temporal coverage, we investigate the cross-platform transferability between training sets derived from Sentinel-1 Extra Wide (S1 EW) and RADARSAT-2 (RS2) ScanSAR Wide A (SCWA) and Fine Quad-polarimetric (FQ) data, as the same radiometrically calibrated backscatter coefficients are expected from these two C-band SAR platforms. For this, we use a novel sea ice classification method developed based on Arctic-wide S1 EW training, which considers the ice-type-dependent change of SAR backscatter intensity with incident angle (IA). This study focuses on the region near Fram Strait north of Svalbard to utilize expert knowledge of ice conditions from co-authors who participated in the Norwegian young sea ICE (N-ICE2015) expedition in the region. Separate training sets for S1 EW, RS2 SCWA and RS2 FQ data are derived using manually drawn polygons of different ice types, and are used to re-train the classifier. Results show that although the best classification accuracy is achieved for each dataset using its own training, different training sets yield similar results and IA slopes, with the exception of leads with calm open water, nilas or newly formed ice (the “leads”' class). This is found to be caused by different noise floor configurations of S1 and RS2 data, which lead to different IA slopes of this class. This indicates that dataset-specific re-training is needed for leads in the cross-platform application of the classifier. Based on the classifier thus re-trained for each dataset, the classification scheme is altered to target the separation of level and deformed ice, which enables direct comparison with independently derived sea ice deformation maps. The comparisons show that the classification of C-band SAR can be used to distinguish areas of ice divergence occupied by leads, young ice and level first-year ice (LFYI). However, it has limited capacity in delineating areas of ice deformation due to ambiguities in ice types represented by classes with higher backscatter intensities. This study provides reference to future studies seeking cross-platform application of training sets so they are fully utilized, and we expect further development of the classifier and the inclusion of other SAR datasets to enable image classification-based ice deformation detection using only satellite SAR data.

Download Full-text