Deep Ice Layer Tracking and Thickness Estimation using Fully Convolutional Networks

Debvrat Varshney, Maryam Rahnemoonfar, Masoud Yari, John Paden

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

13 Scopus citations

Abstract

Global warming is rapidly reducing glaciers and ice sheets across the world. Real time assessment of this reduction is required so as to monitor its global climatic impact. In this paper, we introduce a novel way of estimating the thickness of each internal ice layer using Snow Radar images and Fully Convolutional Networks. The estimated thickness can be used to understand snow accumulation each year. To understand the depth and structure of each internal ice layer, we perform multiclass semantic segmentation on radar images, which hasn't been performed before. As the radar images lack good training labels, we carry out a pre-processing technique to get a clean set of labels. After detecting each ice layer uniquely, we calculate its thickness and compare it with the processed ground truth. This is the first time that each ice layer is detected separately and its thickness calculated through automated techniques. Through this procedure we were able to estimate the ice-layer thicknesses within a Mean Absolute Error of approximately 3.6 pixels. Such a Deep Learning based method can be used with ever-increasing datasets to make accurate assessments for cryospheric studies.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProceedings - 2020 IEEE International Conference on Big Data, Big Data 2020
EditorsXintao Wu, Chris Jermaine, Li Xiong, Xiaohua Tony Hu, Olivera Kotevska, Siyuan Lu, Weijia Xu, Srinivas Aluru, Chengxiang Zhai, Eyhab Al-Masri, Zhiyuan Chen, Jeff Saltz
PublisherInstitute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
Pages3943-3952
Number of pages10
ISBN (Electronic)9781728162515
DOIs
StatePublished - Dec 10 2020
Externally publishedYes
Event8th IEEE International Conference on Big Data, Big Data 2020 - Virtual, Atlanta, United States
Duration: Dec 10 2020Dec 13 2020

Publication series

NameProceedings - 2020 IEEE International Conference on Big Data, Big Data 2020

Conference

Conference8th IEEE International Conference on Big Data, Big Data 2020
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityVirtual, Atlanta
Period12/10/2012/13/20

Funding

This work is supported by NSF BIGDATA awards (IIS-1838230, IIS-1838024), IBM, and Amazon.

FundersFunder number
National Science FoundationIIS-1838024, IIS-1838230
Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering1838230, 1838024
International Business Machines Corporation

    Keywords

    • Fully Convolutional Networks
    • Ice Layer Thickness
    • Radargrams
    • Semantic Segmentation

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