Glacier frontal line extraction from Sentinel-1 SAR imagery in Prydz area

Abstract

Synthetic aperture Radar (SAR) can provide all-day and all-night observation of the earth in all-weather conditions with high resolution, and it is widely used in polar research including sea ice, sea shelf, as well as the glaciers. For glaciers monitoring, the frontal position of a calving glacier at different moments of time is of great importance, which indicates the estimation of the calving rate and flux of the glaciers. In this abstract, an automatic algorithm for glacier frontal extraction using time series Sentinel-1 SAR imagery is proposed. The technique transforms the amplitude imagery of Sentinel-1 SAR into a binary map using SO-CFAR method, and then frontal points are extracted using profile method which reduces the 2D binary map to 1D binary profiles, the final frontal position of a calving glacier is the optimal profile selected from the different average segmented profiles. The experiment proves that the detection algorithm for SAR data can automatically extract the frontal position of glacier with high efficiency.