Incidence Angle Dependence of Texture Statistics From Sentinel-1 HH-Polarization Images of Winter Arctic Sea Ice

The proliferation of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imagery, its accessibility in open platforms like Google Earth Engine, and the development of automated classification and geophysical information extraction algorithms have prompted the need for understanding the role of incidence angle (IA) on radar scattering mechanism, backscatter intensity, and classification accuracy. This letter demonstrates the dependence of image texture parameters on SAR IA, using Arctic landfast sea ice samples extracted from C-band frequency Sentinel-1 SAR scenes collected during the winter period. Gray-level cooccurrence matrix (GLCM) derived texture parameters, and occurrence texture parameters, derived from undeformed first-year sea ice and multi-year sea ice, which are dominated by surface and volume scattering mechanisms, respectively, were analyzed. All GLCM texture parameters were found to be dependent on IA, highlighting the need for consideration of angular dependence in texture parameters, particularly in the development of image classification and inversion algorithms utilizing them. Occurrence texture parameters showed negligible influence by IA; however, feature discrimination capability was also lost. Some GLCM parameters had similar angular dependencies for both sea ice types, suggesting that, in some cases, global image normalization approaches for texture may be applied to account for the IA effect.

Automated summary

This study demonstrates the dependence of image texture parameters on the incidence angle (IA) of synthetic aperture radar (SAR), using Arctic landfast sea ice samples extracted from Sentinel-1 SAR scenes. It highlights the importance of considering angular dependence in the development of texture parameters.