Tracking of the huge Antarctic iceberg A-76

Abstract

This paper presents a processing scheme whose aim is to provide the basis for a fast time-series analysis of iceberg drifting patterns. The study focuses on the drifting of iceberg A-76 and makes use of SAR images which were collected by the Sentinel-1 satellites, from May 2021 to June 2022. The processing scheme is composed of the following steps: a) image pre-processing by morphological theory; b) contextual analysis for performing the segmentation task; and c) regularization of the derived label field. The implemented processing scheme incorporates a further step for measuring the drift trajectory and a geometric characterization of the iceberg’s shape.