SAR Deep Learning Sea Ice Retrieval Trained with Airborne Laser Scanner Measurements from the MOSAiC Expedition
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract. Automated sea ice charting from Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) has been researched for more than a decade and still, we are not close to unlocking the full potential of automated solutions in terms of resolution and accuracy. The central complications arise from ground truth data not being readily available in the polar regions. In this paper, we build a dataset from 20 near coincident X-Band SAR acquisitions and as many Airborne Laser Scanner (ALS) measurements from the Multidisciplinary drifting Observatory for the Study of Arctic Climate (MOSAiC), between October and May. This dataset is then used to assess the accuracy and robustness of five machine learning based approaches, by deriving classes from the freeboard, surface roughness (standard deviation at 0.5 m correlation length) and reflectance. It is shown that there is only a weak correllation of the radar backscatter and the sea ice topography. Accuracies between 40 % and 69 % percent and robustnesses between 68 % and 85 % give a realistic insight into modern classifiers' performance across a range of ice conditions over 8 months. It also marks the first time algorithms are trained entirely with labels from coincident measurements, allowing for a probabilistic class retrieval. The results show that segmentation models able to learn from the class distribution significantly perform pixel-wise classification approaches.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| 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".