Super-Resolution-Aided Sea Ice Concentration Estimation From AMSR2 Images by Encoder–Decoder Networks With Atrous Convolution

Passive microwave data is an important data source for the continuous monitoring of Arctic-wide sea ice concentration (SIC). However, its coarse spatial resolution leads to blurring effects at the ice-water divides, resulting in the great challenges of fine-scale and accurate SIC estimation, especially for regions with low SIC. Besides, the SIC derived by operational algorithms using high-frequency passive microwave observations has great uncertainties in open water or marginal ice zones due to atmospheric effects. In this article, a novel framework is proposed to achieve accurately SIC estimation with improved spatial details from original low-resolution Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer 2 (AMSR2) images, with joint the super-resolution (SR) and SIC estimation network. Based on the SR network, the spatial resolution of original AMSR2 images can be improved by four times, benefiting to construct AMSR2 SR features with more high-frequency information for SIC estimation. The SIC network with an encoder–decoder structure and atrous convolution, is employed to accurately perform the SIC retrieval by considering the characteristics of passive microwave images in the Arctic sea ice region. Experimental results show that the proposed SR-Aided SIC estimation approach can generate accurate SIC with more detailed sea ice textures and much sharper sea ice edges. With respect to MODIS SIC products distributed in Arctic scale, the proposed model achieves a root-mean-square error (RMSE) of 5.94% and mean absolute error (MAE) of 3.04%, whereas the Arctic Radiation and Turbulence Interaction Study (ARTIST) Sea Ice (ASI) SIC results have three and two times greater values of RMSE and MAE.