Abstract
Abstract. Glacier is one of the clearest signal of climate change, and its changes have important effects on regional climate and water resources. Glacier identification is the basic of glacial changes research. Traditional remote sensing glacier identification methods usually perform simple bands calculation based on the spectral characteristics of glacier. The identification results are greatly affected by threshold segmentation. In addition, there is a misclassification of water body and glacier. As a simple and efficient semantic segmentation network, U-Net has been widely used in many fields of image processing. This paper performs an improved semantic segmentation network Deep U-Net for glacier identification using Landsat 8 OLI image as the data source, and compares it with the traditional NDSI glacier identification method. The identification results are validated by the glacier label data produced by visual interpretation. The results indicate that the proposed method achieves an identification accuracy of 97.27%, which is higher than the NDSI glacier identification method. It can effectively exclude the interference of water bodies on glacier identification, and has a higher degree of automation.
Highlights
Glaciers are important freshwater resources on the land surface and are extremely sensitive to climate changes
The automatic glacier identification method based on Deep U-Net network has higher accuracy than the Normalized Difference Snow Index (NDSI) glacier identification method, but the situation of missing detection needs to be improved, especially for some small targets, the identification result is worse than the NDSI method
The Deep U-Net model can be trained with the NDSI image as a channel of the image to verify whether the combination of the NDSI method and the Deep U-Net method can improve the accuracy of glacier identification, and reduce the missed alarm rate of small targets
Summary
Glaciers are important freshwater resources on the land surface and are extremely sensitive to climate changes. Glacier changes have important impacts on climate changes, ecology and the environment, and water resources. The issue of global warming has caused great concern worldwide, and brought about significant glacial ablation. The contribution of global glacial ablation to sea level rise is 29 ± 13% (Gardner et al, 2013; Ye et al, 2016). The continuous rise of sea level could lead to the submersion of some island nations and a large number of people will be homeless. The identification and monitoring of glaciers is of great importance in the study of global climate change
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