ICIBS: Increasing the Context for Ice Boundary Segmentation

Abstract

Mountain glaciers and ice sheets are undergoing rapid loss of ice mass. To assess their current volume and ice-thickness distribution, and to accurately forecast their future, ground-penetrating radar systems are employed to measure ice thickness. These instruments produce radio-echo sounding data that reveal the internal structure of the ice and its boundaries at the surface and beneath the ice body. However, delineating these interfaces is time-consuming as the surveyed area can span several hundred kilometers. To accelerate the labelling process, automated methods have emerged, but they often struggle to delineate the ice bottom, particularly in temperate glaciers. The high water content inherent in temperate ice increases both scattering and attenuation of the radar signal, resulting in weak and ambiguous reflections at the ice bottom and generally noisier data. As a result, the visual features corresponding to the ice bottom become ambiguous. To address this issue, we propose several extensions to deep learning models that incorporate additional contextual information into the prediction. Specifically, we integrate modifications that incorporate additional spatial and geo-spatial contextual information into the network. With these enhancements, we achieve a new state-of-the-art performance on the IceAnatomy benchmark dataset, with mean errors of 10.9 m for the FAU subset and 43.4 m for the CReSIS subset in a single combined system. We also demonstrate that our method generalises well to previously unseen data, outperforming the baseline by 49.6 % on new campaign data from Patagonia. The model code and the new dataset are available at https://github.com/ki7077/ICIBS/tree/main and https://zenodo.org/records/23392580.