Arctic Sea Ice Characterization using RISAT-1 Compact-Pol SAR Imagery and Feature Evaluation: A Case Study Over North-East Greenland

Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) polarimetry has become a valuable tool in space-borne SAR-based sea ice analysis. The two major objectives in SAR-based remote sensing of sea ice are, on the one hand, to have a large coverage and, on the other hand, to obtain a radar response that carries as much information as possible in order to characterize sea ice. Single-polarimetric acquisitions of existing sensors offer a wide coverage on the ground, whereas dual polarimetric or even better fully polarimetric data offer a higher information content, which allows for a more reliable automated sea ice analysis at a cost of smaller swath. In order to reconcile the advantages of fully polarimetric acquisitions with the higher ground coverage of acquisitions with fewer polarimetric channels, hybrid/compact polarimetric acquisitions offer an excellent tradeoff between the mentioned objectives. With the advent of the RISAT-1 satellite platform, we are able to explore the potential of compact dual pol acquisitions for sea ice analysis and classification. Our algorithmic approach for an automated sea ice classification consist of two steps. In the first step, we perform a feature extraction followed by a feature evaluation procedure. The resulting feature vectors are then ingested into a trained artificial neural network classifier to arrive at a pixel-wise supervised classification. We present a comprehensive polarimetric feature analysis and classification results on a dataset acquired off the eastern Greenland coast, along with comparisons of results obtained from near-coincident (spatially and temporally) C -band fully polarimetric imagery acquired by RADARSAT-2