Iceberg detection and tracking using two-level feature extraction methodology on Antarctica Ocean

This paper aims to develop an automatic feature extraction system for detecting icebergs in Antarctica. Extracting suitable features to discriminate an iceberg from sea ice and land melting based on its content is tedious. Especially in Synthetic Aperture Radar data, high image content is highly affected by speckle noise. Establishing the appropriate spatial relationship between pixels is not producing much accuracy with the standard low-level features. The proposed method introduces the two-level iceberg detection and tracking algorithm. The available samples were used to train the first-level convolution neural network-based features. False-positive predictions have been removed using the multiscale contourlet-based Haralick texture features in the second level. The final detected iceberg movement has been tracked using the temporal image data. The distance moved in both temporal images is computed with the help of latitude and longitude information. The proposed methodology exhibited the best performance over state-of-the-art methods and acquired 79.1% precision and 83.8 F1 score.