Information fusion for estimation of summer MIZ ice concentration from SAR imagery

The authors define the concept of information fusion and show how they used it to estimate summer sea ice concentration in the marginal ice zone (MIZ) from single-channel SAR satellite imagery. They used data about melt stage, wind speed, and surface temperature to generate temporally-accumulated information, and fused this information with the SAR image, resulting in an interpretation of summer MIZ imagery. They also used the results of previous classifications of the same area to guide and correct future interpretations, thus fusing historical information with imagery and nonimagery data. They chose to study the summer MIZ since summer melt conditions cause classification based upon backscatter intensity to fail, as the backscatter of open water, thin ice, first-year ice, and multiyear ice overlap to a large degree. This makes it necessary to fuse various information and data to achieve proper segmentation and automated classification of the image. Their results were evaluated qualitatively and showed that their approach produces very good ice concentration estimates in the summer MIZ.