Estimation of Discontinuous Non-Rigid Dynamics in Sea Ice Using Satellite Imagery
People: Mani Thomas, Chandra Kambhamettu and Cathleen Geiger
The changes in the global climatic conditions are believed to be intimately connected to the dynamics, thickness, and extent of the sea ice in the Arctic and Antarctic. Given the importance of these geophysical phenomena, researchers have undertaken many studies to ascertain the changes that are occurring in sea ice. With the availability of high-spatial resolution, and all-weather Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) sensors, it is now possible to complement point measurements taken on the ice, with measurements from a much larger geophysical scale (500 ~ 1000 sqkm). This also provides a non-intrusive method to track sea ice, which is an important component in understanding the sea ice mass balance.
This work extends the body of knowledge on sea ice motion tracking in three specific directions. The first is in the development of a computationally efficient, high-resolution motion tracking system at the geo-spatial mesoscale (1 ~ 100 sqkm). Using this motion tracking algorithm, it is possible to estimate differential motion at a resolution of ~400m within a locally referenced coordinate system. Unlike Pan-Arctic products that track sea ice motion at a standard resolution of 3~5km, this motion tracking system is able to estimate local dynamics at a much finer resolution. This system thus provides a possible mechanism to complement existing large-scale motion tracking efforts with a fine resolution local motion. The second direction of this work focuses on the extension of the motion tracking technique to handle motion at close proximity to discontinuous regions. This work primarily stems from the requirement to identify and track discontinuous zones across large (basin) scales. Finally, this work also focuses on the development of a vector field interpolation technique. This technique allows vector field characteristics to be incorporated into the interpolation via local streamline approximations.
In the news
- Far North Science article 'IPY: When the ice quakes'
- Science Daily article 'Measuring Changes In Arctic Sea Ice'
- UD Review article 'Univ. professors engage in Arctic ice study'
- UDaily article on our sea ice tracking work
Software
Data
Related publications
Thesis
- M. Thomas, Analysis of Large Magnitude Discontinuous Non-rigid Motion, Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Delaware, December 2008.
- M. Thomas, Global Motion Estimation Of Sea Ice Using Synthetic Aperture Radar Imagery, M.S. Thesis, University of Delaware, May 2004.
Book Chapters
- Geiger, C. A., M. V. Thomas, and C. Kambhamettu. SAR motion products: Tools for monitoring changes in sea ice mass balance and thickness distribution, in Arctic Sea Ice Thickness: Past, Present and Future, 10 pages, 2007.
Journal Papers
- J. Hutchings, C. Geiger, J. Richter-Menge, M. Doble, R. Forsberg, K. Giles, C. Haas, S. Hendricks, C. Khambhamettu, S. Laxon, T. Martin, M. Pruis, M. Thomas, P. Wadhams, H. J. Zwally, Role of Ice Dynamics in the Sea Ice Mass Balance, EOS, 89, 50, 515-516, 2008.
- Thomas, M., C. A. Geiger and C. Kambhamettu. High resolution (400m) Motion Characterization of Sea Ice using ERS-1 SAR Imagery, Cold Regions Science and Technology, 52, 207-223, 2008.
Conference Papers
- Thomas, M., C. Kambhamettu and C. A. Geiger, Vector Field Resampling using Local Streamline Approximation, Proceedings of the 19th International Conference on Pattern Recognition (ICPR) , Tampa, Florida, December, 2008.
- Thomas, M., C. A. Geiger, C. Kambhamettu and P. Kannan, Streamline Regularization for Large Discontinuous Motion of Sea Ice, Proceedings of the 5th IAPR Workshop on Pattern Recognition in Remote Sensing (in conjunction with ICPR), Tampa, Florida, December, 2008.
- Thomas, M., C. Kambhamettu, C. A. Geiger, Mapping of Large Scale Discontinuous Motion of Sea Ice, Ph.D. showcase at the ACM SIGSPATIAL International Conference on Advances in Geographic Information Systems (ACM GIS) , Santorini, Greece, May, 2008.
- Thomas, M., C. Kambhamettu, C. A. Geiger, J. Hutchings and M. Engram, Near-real time motion analysis for APLIS 2007: A systems modeling perspective, Proceedings of the 15th ACM International Symposium on Advances in Geographic Information Systems (in cooperation with SIGMETRICS), Seattle, November, 2007.
- Thomas, M., C. A. Geiger, C. Kambhamettu, J. Hutchings and M. Engram, Near-real time estimation of sea ice deformation and its application at the APLIS Ice Camp 2007, Proceedings of the Annual Conference of the Remote Sensing and Photogrammetry Society, Newcastle-Upon-Tyne, UK, September, 2007.
- Thomas, M., C. A. Geiger and C. Kambhamettu, High Resolution Motion Estimation of sea ice using an Implicit Quad-Tree Approach, Proceedings of the ISPRS Workshop on High-Resolution Earth Imaging for Geospatial Information, Hannover, Germany, 2007.
- Thomas, M., C. A. Geiger and C. Kambhamettu, Vector field characterization in ERS-1 imagery of sea-ice, Proceedings of the 8th Workshop on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV), Austin, February, 2007.
- Thomas, M., C. A. Geiger and C. Kambhamettu, Mesoscale Sea Ice Features Derived From Discontinuous Nonrigid Motion SAR Products, Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Port and Ocean Engineering Under Arctic Conditions (POAC), Vol. 3, pp1011-1020, Potsdam, NY, 2006.
- Thomas, M., C. Geiger and C. Kambhamettu, Discontinuous Non-Rigid Motion Analysis of Sea Ice using C-Band Synthetic Aperture Radar Satellite Imagery, IEEE Workshop on Articulated and Nonrigid Motion (in conjunction with CVPR), Washington DC, June, 2004.
- Mani, V. T., A. Shah, and G. C. Reddy, A Fast Block Motion Estimation Algorithm Based on Motion Adaptive Partitioning, Indian Conference on Computer Vision, Graphics and Image Processing (ICVGIP), Bangalore, December, 2000.