Airborne Snow Radar Data Simulation with Deep Learning and Physics-Driven Methods

Monitoring properties of ice sheets in polar regions is one of the main challenges in glaciology. There is a large amount of heterogeneous radar data from the polar regions that have been gathered through expensive missions. However, retrieving meaningful information from this large volume of data is still a great challenge. With the advancement of machine learning techniques in recent years, many scientists are eager to take advantage of these algorithms and techniques to explore and mine Arctic and Antarctic data. These advancements, however, have happened mainly in the area of supervised learning where the models are data hungry and require large amounts of annotated data. Generating simulated data can be an effective and inexpensive approach to provide large labeled datasets for training machine learning models. In this work, we explore two approaches to simulate arctic snow radar echogram images, namely a radar scattering physics based approach combined with some statistical measures and a purely data-driven approach based on a conditional generative adversarial network. Using several image comparison metrics, we analyze the utility of both methods for the purpose of simulating echograms. Our results show that the physics simulator generates images with good structural similarities, while the purely data-driven approach achieves better textural similarities for simulated image. Finally, we also show that by augmenting our real dataset by the simulated echograms, we can improve our deep learning model for tracking internal layers of snow.