High-Resolution Resolution Sea Ice Motion Estimation With Optical Flow Using Satellite Spectroradiometer Data
Abstract: The purpose of this paper is twofold: 1) to propose an approach based on optical flow for the estimation of sea ice motion as an accurate, dense, and computationally efficient alternative to state state-of-the-art art pattern matching approaches and 2) to investigat investigate e the potential of moderate resolution imaging spectroradiometer (MODIS) optical satellite data for combined daily and highhigh resolution motion estimation. A series of MODIS image pairs for a selected region in Arctic Ocean is employed, and sparse pairwise ccorrespondences orrespondences between nonrigid patches are calculated. An edge edge-preserving sparse-to-dense dense interpolation is applied followed by variational energy minimization to compute the final optical flow. A state-of-the the-art art multiresolution pattern matching method based ba on phase correlation and normalized cross correlation is also implemented and evaluated for comparison. Thorough experimentation with different settings of input data preprocessing as well as varying scales of motion is performed. The derived motion vectors ctors are compared with coarser resolution operational sea ice motion vector products from combined buoy and microwave satellite data. The proposed optical flow approach clearly outperforms the pattern matching method in most cases, both in terms of accura accuracy cy and motion vector consistency. The estimated motion vectors from the MODIS images highly correlate with the operational vector products. In addition, MODIS provides a vector field with