Sea Ice Classification Using Cryosat-2 Altimeter Data by Optimal Classifier–Feature Assembly

Sea ice type is one of the most sensitive variables in Arctic ice monitoring and detailed information about it is essential for ice situation evaluation, vessel navigation, and climate prediction. Many machine-learning methods including deep learning can be employed for ice-type detection, and most classifiers tend to prefer different feature combinations. In order to find the optimal classifier–feature assembly (OCF) for sea ice classification, it is necessary to assess their performance differences. The objective of this letter is to make a recommendation for the OCF for sea ice classification using Cryosat-2 (CS-2) data. Six classifiers including convolutional neural network (CNN), Bayesian, $K$ nearest-neighbor (KNN), support vector machine (SVM), random forest (RF), and back propagation neural network (BPNN) were studied. CS-2 altimeter data of November 2015 and May 2016 in the whole Arctic were used. The overall accuracy was estimated using multivalidation to evaluate the performances of individual classifiers with different feature combinations. Overall, RF achieved a mean accuracy of 89.15%, followed by Bayesian, SVM, and BPNN (~86%), outperforming the worst (CNN and KNN) by 7%. Trailing-edge width (TeW) and leading-edge width (LeW) were the most important features, and feature combination of TeW, LeW, Sigma0, maximum of the returned power waveform (MAX), and pulse peakiness (PP) was the best choice. RF with feature combination of TeW, LeW, Sigma0, MAX, and PP was finally selected as the OCF for sea ice classification and the results that demonstrated this method achieved a mean accuracy of 91.45%, which outperformed the other state-of-art methods by 9%.