Smart Tracking of Internal Layers of Ice in Radar Data via Multi-Scale Learning

Masoud Yari, Maryam Rahnemoonfar, John Paden, Ibikunle Oluwanisola, Lora Koenig, Lynn Montgomery

Abstract: Artificial intelligence (AI) techniques have displayed impressive success in many practical fields. Deep neural networks (DNNs) owe their success to the availability of massive labeled data. However, in many real-world problems, even when a large dataset is available, deep learning methods have shown less success, due to causes such as lack of large labeled dataset, presence of noise in data, or missing data. In the present work, we intend to examine the application of deep learning methods on radar data gathered from polar regions. Our goal is to track internal ice layers in radar imagery. In such data, the presence of noise is one of the main obstacles in utilizing popular deep learning methods such as transfer learning. Our experiments show that if the neural network is trained to detect contours of objects in electro-optical imagery, it can only track a low percentage of contours in radar data. Fine-tuning and further training do not provide any better results. However, we will show that selecting the right model and training the model on the radar imagery from the base, is going to yield far better results. We also discuss another possible learning approach that can save us time for data annotation.