Automatic glacier calving front delineation on terrasar-x and sentinel-1 sar imagery

This paper presents an approach for automatic calving front delineation of marine-terminating outlet glaciers. We utilize a Canny edge detection approach together with a shortest path optimization problem to find calving front locations (CFL) on SAR backscattering images from Sentinel-1 and TerraSAR-X. The CFLs are detected on Stripmap images acquired over Zachariae Isstrœm in Northeast Greenland where difficult conditions for CFL retrieval exist. We compare our results to CFLs that are delineated by hand and find good agreement, independent of the used sensor.