Creating a semantic segmentationmachine learning model for sea icedetection on radar images to study theThwaites region

Abstract: This thesis presents a deep learning tool able to identify ice in radar images fromthe sea-ice environment of the Twhaites glacier outlet. The project is motivatedby the threatening situation of the Thwaites glacier that has been increasingits mass loss rate during the last decade. This is of concern considering thelarge mass of ice held by the glacier, that in case of melting, could increasethe mean sea level by more than +65 cm [1]. The algorithm generated alongthis work is intended to help in the generation of navigation charts and identificationof icebergs in future stages of the project, outside of the scope of this thesis.The data used for this task are ICEYE’s X-band radar images from the Thwaitessea-ice environment, the target area to be studied. The corresponding groundtruth for each of the samples has been manually generated identifying the iceand icebergs present in each image. Additional data processing includes tiling,to increment the number of samples, and augmentation, done by horizontal andvertical flips of a random number of tiles.The proposed tool performs semantic segmentation on radar images classifyingthe class "Ice". It is developed by a deep learning Convolutional Neural Network(CNN) model, trained with prepared ICEYE’s radar images. The model reachesvalues of F1 metric higher than 89% in the images of the target area (Thwaitessea-ice environment) and is able to generalize to different regions of Antarctica,reaching values of F1 = 80 %. A potential alternative version of the algorithm isproposed and discussed. This alternative score F1 values higher than F1 > 95 %for images of the target environment and F1 = 87 % for the image of the differentregion. However, it must not be confirmed as the final algorithm due to the needfor further verification.