GLACIERMONITORING: CORRELATION VERSUS TEXTURE TRACKING

Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images provide scatter-ing information which can be used under any weather conditions for glacier monitoring. Our purpose is to es-timate a displacement field characterizing at each po-sition the local speeds and orientations of the glacier displacement. Recent proposed methods build a vector field by tracking patches between two SAR images co-registered on static areas and sensed at different times [1, 2]. The tracking is performed either by evaluating the correlations or the similarities from one acquisition to the other. We propose to estimate locally the displace-ment vectors by using either the maximum correlation or a maximum likelihood estimator. This local estima-tion is then refined to provide a sub-pixelic result. The efficiency of both methods are compared. Index Terms — Glacier monitoring, texture tracking, normalized cross-correlation, maximum likelihoo