Rock Outcrop Detection from RADARSAT-1 Datasets Based on Constant False Alarm

Microwave data has become the leading dataset in polar remote sensing research. In this paper, based on the CFAR algorithm, rock outcrop information is extracted from RADARSAT-1 synthetic aperture radar datasets, which yields high resolution imagery with good contrast between rock outcroppings and glacier ice. In order to choose the suitable parameters for the mountain range rock outcrop information extraction, evaluation of the effectiveness different models was conducted on representative datasets. In experiments, the results of Weibull distribution based SO-CFAR method demonstrate that the accuracy of rock outcrops detection ratio was larger than 80% and the overall error ratio was less than 8%, which verifies that the proposed method has a great potential for analyzing the rock outcroppings in the Antarctic.