PCA-based sea-ice image fusion of optical data by HIS transform and SAR data by wavelet transform

Abstract

Sea ice as a disaster has recently attracted a great deal of attention in China. Its monitoring has become a routine task for the maritime sector. Remote sensing, which depends mainly on SAR and optical sensors, has become the primary means for sea-ice research. Optical images contain abundant sea-ice multi-spectral information, whereas SAR images contain rich sea-ice texture information. If the characteristic advantages of SAR and optical images could be combined for sea-ice study, the ability of sea-ice monitoring would be improved. In this study, in accordance with the characteristics of sea-ice SAR and optical images, the transformation and fusion methods for these images were chosen. Also, a fusion method of optical and SAR images was proposed in order to improve sea-ice identification. Texture information can play an important role in sea-ice classification. Haar wavelet transformation was found to be suitable for the sea-ice SAR images, and the texture information of the sea-ice SAR image from Advanced Synthetic Aperture Radar (ASAR) loaded on ENVISAT was documented. The results of our studies showed that, the optical images in the hue-intensity-saturation (HIS) space could reflect the spectral characteristics of the sea-ice types more efficiently than in the red-green-blue (RGB) space, and the optical image from the China-Brazil Earth Resources Satellite (CBERS-02B) was transferred from the RGB space to the HIS space. The principal component analysis (PCA) method could potentially contain the maximum information of the sea-ice images by fusing the HIS and texture images. The fusion image was obtained by a PCA method, which included the advantages of both the sea-ice SAR image and the optical image. To validate the fusion method, three methods were used to evaluate the fused image, i.e., objective, subjective, and comprehensive evaluations. It was concluded that the fusion method proposed could improve the ability of image interpretation and sea-ice identification.