Detection and discrimination of icebergs and ships using satellite altimetry

摘要

Recent research has confirmed that satellite altimetry can be used for detecting icebergs. In an effort to validate the altimetry-based approach, this study used 105 samples of icebergs contained in both satellite altimeter data and ENVISAT-ASAR scenes for the Weddell Sea area. The probability of detecting icebergs larger than 150 m waterline-length was 47%. The problem of discriminating ships and icebergs based on altimeter measurements was addressed using an ensemble of automated classifiers. A total of ten features were defined from the altimetry signal to be used as predictor variables in supervised classification. The classifier ensemble comprised discriminant functions, k-nearest neighbor, neural networks, support vector machines, and decision tree analysis. Several algorithms successfully classified objects as ships or icebergs with an accuracy exceeding 85%.