An Improved Lightweight U-Net for Sea Ice Lead Extraction From Multipolarization SAR Images

Precise and fast extraction of sea ice leads is the foundation for polar research and ship navigation. The accuracy of traditional methods for sea ice lead extraction is limited, and the efficiency of deep learning methods is difficult to guarantee. Besides, the tedious preprocessing steps complicate the application of existing methods. In this article, we proposed a lightweight semantic segmentation model based on the U-Net framework for sea ice lead extraction, which introduced lightweight blocks and a feature branch. Lightweight blocks took the place of the convolutional layers in U-Net to reduce the network parameters and increase operational speed. With the input of the contrast feature of horizontal-vertical (HV) polarization, the feature branch was used to improve the extraction precision and robustness. Besides, the combination of the lightweight blocks, feature branch and U-Net framework was beneficial to resist preprocessing. In the experiments, the performance of the proposed method on non-preprocessed Sentinel-1 dataset was better than that of the classical semantic segmentation method on preprocessed Sentinel-1 dataset in floating-point operations (FLOPs), parameters, frames per second (FPS), and accuracy evaluation. The results indicate that the proposed network is effective and lightweight for sea ice lead extraction from non-preprocessed data.