Analysis and Classification of high Arctic Glaciers with ASAR Data

We apply a polarimetric classification scheme to Envisat Alternating Polarisation mode ASAR images and compare to ground truth data. By analysing images with a range of acquisition conditions and comparing the classification accuracy with the ground truth data, we investigate the influence of the acquisition conditions for glacier facies discrimination. We find that the main influence is the image swath angle, which affects the image pixel geometry. There was no obvious preference for the different polarisation channels, although the dual polarisation classifications were consistently better than single polarisation classifications.