<title>Matching method used for the estimation of sea-ice motion fron ERS-1/2 SAR image pairs</title>

Abstract

The estimation of sea ice motion in the Arctic Ocean is of interest for climate aspects, ocean dynamics, and ship navigation. Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) has provided information to extract the motion of sea ice in the Arctic Ocean. In order to estimate the sea ice motion from ERS-1/2 SAR image pairs or sequences, this paper present a coarse- to-fine or hierarchical matching method. The method has tow steps. In the first step, the mean drift of the sea ice motion is extracted from the image pair by using a spectral maximum cross-correlation matching technique. In the second stp, the detail movement after compensating for the mean drift is retrieved by using a distance measure called the sum-of-squared difference matching technique based on a Laplacian pyramid data structure. The paper also gives some experimental results which show that the method has good performance in the estimation of sea ice motion in the Arctic Ocean from ERS-1/2 SAR image pairs.