Sea Ice Change Detection in SAR Images Based on Collaborative Representation

Sea ice change detection from synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images is important for navigation safety and natural resource extraction. This paper proposed a sea ice change detection method from SAR images based on collaborative representation. First, neighborhood-based ratio is used to generate a difference image (DI). Then, some reliable samples are selected from the DI by hierarchical fuzzy C-means (FCM) clustering. Finally, based upon these samples, collaborative representation method is utilized to classify pixels from the original SAR images into unchanged and changed class. From there, the final change map can be obtained. Experimental results on two real sea ice datasets demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method over two closely related methods.