Sea Ice Image Classification Based on Heterogeneous Data Fusion and Deep Learning

Abstract

Sea ice is one of the typical causes of marine disasters. Sea ice image classification is an important component of sea ice detection. Optical data contain rich spectral information, but they do not allow one to easily distinguish between ground objects with a similar spectrum and foreign objects with the same spectrum. Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data contain rich texture information, but the data usually have a single source. The limitation of single-source data is that they do not allow for further improvements of the accuracy of remote sensing sea ice classification. In this paper, we propose a method for sea ice image classification based on deep learning and heterogeneous data fusion. Utilizing the advantages of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) in terms of depth feature extraction, we designed a deep learning network structure for SAR and optical images and achieve sea ice image classification through feature extraction and a feature-level fusion of heterogeneous data. For the SAR images, the improved spatial pyramid pooling (SPP) network was used and texture information on sea ice at different scales was extracted by depth. For the optical data, multi-level feature information on sea ice such as spatial and spectral information on different types of sea ice was extracted through a path aggregation network (PANet), which enabled low-level features to be fully utilized due to the gradual feature extraction of the convolution neural network. In order to verify the effectiveness of the method, two sets of heterogeneous sentinel satellite data were used for sea ice classification in the Hudson Bay area. The experimental results show that compared with the typical image classification methods and other heterogeneous data fusion methods, the method proposed in this paper fully integrates multi-scale and multi-level texture and spectral information from heterogeneous data and achieves a better classification effect (96.61%, 95.69%).