Assessment of Sea-Ice Classification Capabilities during Melting Period Using Airborne Multi-Frequency PolSAR Data

Sea-ice mapping using Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) in the melt season poses challenges, primarily due to meltwater complicating the distinguishability of sea-ice types. In response to this issue, this study introduces a novel method for classifying sea ice during the Bohai Sea’s melting period. The method categorizes sea ice into five types: open water (OW), gray ice (Gi), melting gray ice (GiW), gray–white Ice (Gw), and melting gray–white Ice (GwW). To achieve this classification, 51 polarimetric features are extracted from L-, S-, and C-band PolSAR data using various polarization decomposition methods. This study assesses the separability of these features among different combinations of sea-ice type by calculating the Euclidean distance (ED). The Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifier, when employed with single-frequency polarimetric feature sets, achieves the highest accuracy for OW and Gi in the C-band, GiW in the S-band, and Gw and GwW in the L-band. Remarkably, the C-band features exhibit the overall highest accuracy when compared to the L-band and S-band. Furthermore, employing a multi-dimensional polarimetric feature set significantly improves classification accuracy to 94.55%, representing a substantial enhancement of 9% to 22% compared to single-frequency classification. Benefiting from the performance advantages of Random Forest (RF) classifiers in handling large datasets, RF classifiers achieve the highest classification accuracy of 95.84%. The optimal multi-dimensional feature composition includes the following: L-band: SE, SEI, α¯, Span; S-band: SEI, SE, Span, PV-Freeman, λ1, λ2; C-band: SE, SEI, Span, λ3, PV-Freeman. The results of this study provide a reliable new method for future sea-ice monitoring during the melting season.