Identification of glaciers using fully polarimetric SAR data based on deep-learning

Glacier identification is important for monitoring water resources and climate change in surrounding areas. Although optical images have achieved high accuracy in glacier boundary identification, optical images are affected by cloud cover, and reproducing information under the clouds is difficult. Fully polarized SAR images contain rich features, and deep learning can fully exploit image information. Therefore, using fully polarized SAR images combined with deep learning can compensate for the lack of optical images and obtain accurate glacier recognition results. In this paper, VGG16-unet (VGG16 combined with U-net) is used to identify glaciers based on ALOS2-PALSAR fully polarized images of the western part of the Himalayas. The features include the diagonal elements of the polarization coherence matrix, Freeman-Durden, H/A/α, Pauli, VanZyl, and Yamaguchi polarization decomposition parameters totaling 19 features. To make full use of the image information, these features are analyzed and combined, and the glacier recognition accuracies are compared to select the best features. Given evident differences between glacier and nonglacier topography, elevation, slope, and local incidence angle are combined with polarization features as auxiliary features. Comparing the classification accuracy of different polarization features reveals the accuracy of Pauli, Freeman-Durden, VanZyl, and Yamaguchi features based on physical characteristics is higher, among which Pauli features have the highest accuracy with an Overall Accuracy (OA) of 92.54% and an average user intersection ratio (mIoU) of 78.78%. The OA is improved to 94.34%, and the mIoU is improved to 82.35% after adding the topographic data. In order to improve the recognition accuracy of glaciers further, a feature cross-combination approach is proposed, and results show the OA of the combination reaches 94.98%, and the mIoU reaches 85.67%, which are 0.64% and 3.32% higher than the classification accuracy of Pauli features, respectively. Selecting the best feature combination method and combining with deep learning plays an important role in improving the accuracy of glacier recognition, and the use of neural networks combined with fully polarized SAR images can effectively compensate for the shortcomings of optical images in glacier boundary identification. © 2023 Science Press. All rights reserved.