Sea ice team contributers: Alek Petty, Andrew Barrett, Xin Miao, Phil McDowell, Vivek Balasubramanian Thanks also to the hackathon organizers of the Polar Research Coordination Network (RCN)
Deriving sea ice concentration, floe size, and melt pond distributions through object-based image classification algorithms based on high spatial resolution sea ice images (HRI).
We expect to use a large number of HRI for deriving detailed sea ice concentration, floe size, and melt pond distributions over wider regions, and extracting sea ice physical parameters and their corresponding changes between years. Manually delineating sea ice and melt ponds is time-consuming and labor-intensive. We propose to develop a HPDC version of object-based image classification algorithm as a cyberinfrastructrure (CI) module, so that the interoperability can be realized not only at the data exchange and Web services level, but at the knowledge or product level.
Our original algorithm includes three major steps: (1) the image segmentation groups the neighboring pixels into objects according to the similarity of spectral and textural information; (2) a random forest classifier (RF) distinguishes four general classes: water, general submerged ice (GSI, including melt ponds and submerged ice along ice edges), shadow, and ice/snow; and (3) the polygon neighbor analysis further separates melt ponds and submerged ice from the GSI according to their spatial relationships. So far we only applied it to a rather small data set (163 aerial photographs taken during the Chinese National Arctic Research Expedition in summer 2010 (CHINARE 2010) in the Arctic Pacific Sector) due to the limited computation resources.
Data sets (all images are in JPG or TIFF format)--
Declassified GFL data (1755 images) 450 GB The six fiducial sites and repeated images tracking data buoys/floes. SHEBA 1998 (Perovich ) 16.5 GB Beaufort Sea, 13 flights between May 17, 1998 and October 4, 1998. Also a few National Technical Means high resolution satellite photographs. HOTRAX 2005 (Perovich)) 31.3 GB TransArctic cruise from Alaska to Norway, 10 flights from August 14, 2005 to September 26, 2005. CHINARE 2008 (Xie) 20.0 GB Pacific Arctic sector (between 140 °W and 180 °W up to 86 °N), August 17 to Sept 5, 2008. CHINARE 2010 (Xie) 23.7 GB Pacific Arctic sector (between 150 °W and 180 °W up to 88.5 °N), July 21 to August 28, 2010 CHINARE 2012 (Xie) 21.2 GB Transpolar section, (Iceland to Bering Strait), August-September 2012 The time lapse camera (Haas) 40.5 GB Cape Joseph Henry (82.8N, -63.6W), May 2011 to July 2012. EM-bird thickness and aerial photos (Haas) 21.2 GB April 2009, 2011, and 2012, between 82.5 N and 86N, and -60W and -70W.
Potential tools/languages to be used: Python, Matlab, ENVI-IDL, ArcGIS