Comparison of Sea Ice Classification from RCM and Sentinel-1 SAR Imagery

As a typical representative of the next generation SAR mission, the RADARSAT Constellation Mission (RCM) provides three C-band SAR satellites with shorter revisit time and broader spatial coverage, which will be widely used in various earth observation applications including sea ice sensing. The Sentinel-1 mission comprises two C-band SAR satellites with dual-polarized imaging capability, providing open and free data from the European Space Agency (ESA). Sea ice classification results of the two C-band SAR missions with a state-of-the-art convolutional neural network: Normalizer-Free ResNet (NFNet) are compared in this paper. HH, HV and cross-polarization ratio are extracted from the overlapping area of dual-polarized RCM and Sentinel-1 images acquired on similar dates. The sea ice classification results shows that RCM Medium Resolution 50m mode performs better than Sentinel-1 EW GRD Medium Resolution mode for the data used in this study.