A Pol-SAR Analysis for Alpine Glacier Classification and Snowline Altitude Retrieval
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this study, we investigated the use of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) polarimetry (Pol-SAR) and a supervised classification technique, support vector machine (SVM), for the classification of bare soil, ice, and snow, over the Ortles-Cevedale massif, (Eastern Italian Alps). We analyzed the importance of topographic correction on the backscattering and polarimetric SAR signature and the advantage of quad-pol with respect to dual-pol data. When backscattering values only are employed, the incidence angle used as input feature of the SVM classifier assures the best classification accuracy, 9.9% higher than the accuracy obtained with cosine corrected γ0backscattering. The introduction of polarimetric features and decomposition parameters (such as Cloude-Pottier or Touzi decomposition parameters) increases the classification accuracy by 5.2% with respect to the backscattering case. The simulation of RADARSAT-2 data as Sentinel-1 like for dual-pol data shows a decrease of accuracy equal to 7.8% with respect to the fully polarimetric case (93.5%). The first Sentinel-1 image acquired on our test area was also employed for classification. We then tested the capability of C-band SAR to detect accumulation and ablation zones of the glaciers under the winter dry snow by setting up a multi-incidence angle and fully polarimetric SVM classifier, exploiting ascending and descending RADARSAT2 data. In this case, the accuracy increased by 14.7% combining different geometric acquisitions (88.9%) with respect to the single geometry case. Finally, from the resulting classification maps, we extracted the snowline altitude for a sample of three glaciers, using both optical and SAR data, comparing the different products.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".