Analysis of the efficiency of the adaptive canny method for the detection of icebergs at open sea

Abstract

The detection of icebergs in the open sea, as well as its evolution in displacement and shrinking, is vital for navigation, the study of the evolution of Polar regions, and the Earth climate change, among others. In order to carry out these studies, it is necessary to delimit accurately the icebergs in satellite images, mainly of the Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) type. The Adaptive Canny method has shown to be efficient for the detection of edges of objects in SAR images, according to recent publications and confer- ences. These studies were only carried out for images that had approximately half of each backscatter, without considering that the dimension of the objects can affect the edge detection process. Here, we present the results of the efficiency of the Adaptive Canny method as the size of the object, from which it is intended to extract the contour, decreases. A systematic analysis of the behavior of the method has been performed with objects of variated dimensions, through a Monte Carlo type experiment with synthetic images, where the contours of the figures were extracted with the Adaptive Canny method and compared with the Ground Truth (GT). Then, the method was tested on real images of the Antarctic Ocean, with blocks of ice of different sizes to contrast the results with those obtained with synthetic images