Deep Tiered Image Segmentation for Detecting Internal ICE Layers in Radar Imagery

Understanding the structure of the ice at the Earth's poles is important for modeling how global warming will impact polar ice and, in turn, the Earth's climate. Ground-penetrating radar is able to collect observations of the internal structure of snow and ice, but the process of manually labeling these observations with layer boundaries is slow and laborious. Recent work has developed automatic techniques for finding ice-bed boundaries, but finding internal boundaries is much more challenging because the number of layers is unknown and the layers can disappear, reappear, merge, and split. In this paper, we propose a novel deep neural network-based model for solving a general class of tiered segmentation problems. We then apply it to detecting internal layers in polar ice, and evaluate on a large-scale dataset of polar ice radar data with human-labeled annotations as ground truth.