SEGMENTATION OF SYNTHETIC-APERTURE RADAR IMAGERY OF SEA-ICE

This paper describes a 'segmentation' algorithm, which has been designed for Synthetic-Aperture Radar (SAR) sea-ice images as part of the U.K. Earth Observation Data Centre (EODC) Science Team activity. The segmented sea-ice product consists of distinct, statistically-homogeneous regions of ice and water from which various attributes can be determined, such as area, centroid position, mean intensity and standard deviation, shape, orientation and texture. Such attributes are important in providing a template from which it is possible to derive information such as ice type, concentration and dynamics, the position of the ice edge, and the characteristics of leads and polynyas. Although the method has been developed for processing ERS-1 data, it is demonstrated in this work using both simulations and SAR sea-ice data obtained from the Seasat campaign of 1978, as ERS-1 data were not yet available at the time of implementation.