Analytical Logit Scaling for High-Resolution Sea Ice Topology Retrieval from Weakly Labeled SAR Imagery

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel weakly supervised deep learning method that combines SAR and radiometry data with an Analytical Logit Scaling technique to accurately map high-resolution sea ice features from coarse labels, improving detail and physical consistency.

Contribution

It presents an innovative post-inference scaling method that enhances weakly supervised segmentation, enabling detailed ice fracture detection without manual pixel annotations.

Findings

Achieves 78% accuracy on fragmented summer scenes.

Reveals fine-grained sea ice fractures at 40-meter resolution.

Preserves regional ice concentration while detailing local topology.

Abstract

High-resolution sea ice mapping using Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) is crucial for Arctic navigation and climate monitoring. However, operational ice charts provide only coarse, region-level polygons (weak labels), forcing automated segmentation models to struggle with pixel-level accuracy and often yielding under-confident, blurred concentration maps. In this paper, we propose a weakly supervised deep learning pipeline that fuses Sentinel-1 SAR and AMSR-2 radiometry data using a U-Net architecture trained with a region-based loss. To overcome the severe under-confidence caused by weak labels, we introduce an Analytical Logit Scaling method applied post-inference. By dynamically calculating the temperature and bias based on the latent space percentiles (2\% and 98\%) of each scene, we force a physical binarization of the predictions. This adaptive scaling acts as a topological extractor, successfully revealing fine-grained sea ice fractures (leads) at a 40-meter resolution without requiring any manual pixel-level annotations. Our approach not only resolves local topology but also perfectly preserves regional macroscopic concentrations, achieving a 78\% accuracy on highly fragmented summer scenes, thereby bridging the gap between weakly supervised learning and high-resolution physical segmentation.