Detecting Icebergs in Sea Ice Using Dual Polarized Satellite Radar Imagery

Abstract

Two synthetic aperture radar (SAR) datasets with validated icebergs in sea ice were analyzed. A qualitative assessment of the data using false colour visualization methods for dual polarization SAR was conducted indicating that icebergs had an improved visually discernable signature from the background over single polarization SAR.A quantitative analysis was completed to exploit these observations. The algorithm development was focused on detection, false alarm removal and false alarm prioritization. The prototype software package developed around these algorithms presently supports RADARSAT-2 Wide and TerraSAR-X Stripmap imagery.