Remote measurement of sea ice dynamics with regularized optimal transport

Abstract

As Arctic conditions rapidly change, human activity in the Arctic will continue to increase and so will the need for high-resolution observations of sea ice. While satellite imagery can provide high spatial resolution, it is temporally sparse and significant ice deformation can occur between observations. This makes it difficult to apply feature tracking or image correlation techniques that require persistent features to exist between images. With this in mind, we propose a technique based on optimal transport, which is commonly used to measure differences between probability distributions. When little ice enters or leaves the image scene, we show that regularized optimal transport can be used to quantitatively estimate ice deformation. We discuss the motivation for our approach and describe efficient computational implementations. Results are provided on a combination of synthetic and MODIS imagery to demonstrate the ability of our approach to estimate dynamics properties at the original image resolution.