Amery Ice Shelf Frontal Position Automatic Detection from Sentinel-1 SAR Imagery

The Amery ice shelf (AIS) is the third largest in Antarctica. Its behavior controls the mass balance of Antarctica and affects sea level rise while studies focusing on the calving at the boundary of AIS are few. In this paper, an efficient and automatic algorithm for AIS frontal line detection using Sentinel-1 SAR imagery is proposed. Based on characteristics of SAR (synthetlc aperture radar) backscatters distribution, smallest of constant false alarm rate (SO-CFAR) algorithm and morphological filter is combined to obtain the binary map of the Sentinel-1 SAR imagery. Then, sliding windows and cumulative sum strategies are applied to automatically detect frontal positions and map the ice frontal lines. The sensitivity of spatial resolution and profile resolution is analyzed by bilinear interpolation for image resolution resampling, and affection of floating ice is considered in the experimental analysis section. Experimental results are compared with state-of-the-art algorithms, and accuracies reported that the proposed algorithm can provide an accurate frontal line under one pixel and prove it is suitable for ice surface melting water and calving conditions.