Neural Networks Based Sea Ice Detection and Concentration Retrieval From GNSS-R Delay-Doppler Maps

In this paper, a neural networks (NN) based scheme is presented for detecting sea ice and retrieving sea ice concentration (SIC) from global navigation satellite system reflectometry delay-Doppler maps (DDMs). Here, a multilayer perceptron neural network with back-propagation learning is adopted. In practice, two NN were separately developed for sea ice detection and concentration retrieval purposes. In the training phase, DDM pixels were employed as an input. The SIC data obtained by Nimbus-7 SMMR and DMSP SSM/ I-SSMIS sensors were used as the target data, which were also regarded as ground-truth data in this paper. After the training process using a dataset collected around February 4, 2015, these networks were used to produce corresponding detection and concentration estimation for other four sets of DDM data, which were collected around February 12, 2015, February 20, 2015, March 16, 2015, and April 17, 2015, respectively. Results show high accuracy in sea ice detection and concentration estimation with DDMs using the proposed scheme. On average, the accuracy for sea ice detection is about 98.4%. In terms of estimated SIC, the mean absolute error is less than 9%, whereas the correlation coefficient is as high as 0.93 compared with the reference data. It was also found that low sea state and wind speed could lead to an overestimation of SIC for partially ice-covered region.