Iceberg Detection Using Compact Polarimetric Synthetic Aperture Radar
Date
2014-12-03
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Abstract
The management and monitoring of icebergs and sea ice is an important consideration for any maritime operations that take place in the polar and near-polar regions. Spaceborne synthetic aperture radar (SAR) satellites can provide iceberg detection capabilities over vast areas of ocean with a quick revisit time. Canada's next Radarsat satellite, the Radarsat Constellation, will collect compact polarimetry, a polarimetric SAR configuration that transmits a circular polarization rather than the typical linear horizontal or vertical polarizations. In doing so, it can provide greater polarimetric information than typical linear dual-polarized SAR, without the swath width restrictions of fully polarimetric or quad-polarized SAR. In this thesis, the use of compact polarimetry for iceberg detection is explored. The detection performance of Radarsat Constellation data, simulated using Radarsat-2 data, is assessed using validated iceberg locations collected by a survey vessel. Many new algorithms are tested for use with compact polarimetric SAR data, including detection methods that use pseudo quad-pol reconstruction, wherein quad-pol covariance matrix elements are approximated using the compact polarimetric covariance matrix. Detection using the Stokes parameters is also tested, both through the use of the skew-normal distribution to model the Stokes vector ocean clutter, and also by using the Stokes parameters to calculate the orientation and ellipticity of the polarization ellipse. A method is proposed where the polarization ellipse parameters are then used to vary the detection threshold for each pixel. Discrimination of ships and icebergs after target detection, using a support vector machine classifier, is also demonstrated. Overall, the compact polarimetric data significantly outperformed the linear dual-polarized data, both in iceberg detection and ship/iceberg discrimination. Compact polarimetry shows much promise for maritime surveillance applications.
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Keywords
Remote Sensing, Engineering--Electronics and Electrical, Engineering--Marine and Ocean
Citation
Denbina, M. (2014). Iceberg Detection Using Compact Polarimetric Synthetic Aperture Radar (Doctoral thesis, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada). Retrieved from https://prism.ucalgary.ca. doi:10.11575/PRISM/26410