Sea-Ice Mapping of RADARSAT-2 Imagery by Integrating Spatial Contexture With Textural Features

Mapping different types of sea ice that form, grow, and melt in polar oceans is essential for shipping navigation, climate change modeling, and local community safety. Currently, ice charts are manually generated by analysts at the Canadian Ice Service based on dual-polarized RADARSAT-2/RADARSAT Constellation Mission imagery on a daily basis. Inspired by the demand for a computer-based mapping system, we have developed an automatic sea-ice classification method that integrates spatial contexture (unsupervised segmentation) with textural features (supervised pixel-level labeling). First, the full-scene image is oversegmented, and the segments are merged into homogeneous regions across the entire scene. Second, pixel-based classifiers (support vector machine and random forest) are compared for their ability to label the generated homogeneous regions. Finally, the segmentation and labeling are combined using a proposed energy function. The proposed method was tested on 18 dual-polarization RADARSAT-2 scenes acquired over the Beaufort Sea. This dataset contains water, young ice, first-year ice, and multiyear ice covering melt, summer, and freeze-up seasons. The proposed method obtains an average classification accuracy of 86.33% based on the leave-one-out validation. The experimental results show that the proposed method achieves promising classification results in both the quantity and quality measurements compared with benchmark methods. The robustness against incidence angle variance indicates that the proposed method is well qualified for operational sea-ice mapping.