Glacier flow monitoring by digital camera and space-borne SAR images

Flavien Vernier (1) , Renaud Fallourd (1) , Jean-Michel Friedt (2) , Yajing Yan (1) , Emmanuel Trouvé (1) , Jean-Marie Nicolas (3) , Luc Moreau (4)

1 LISTIC - Laboratoire d'Informatique, Systèmes, Traitement de l'Information et de la Connaissance
2 SENSEOR - Senseor
3 Télécom ParisTech
4 EDYTEM - Environnements, Dynamiques et Territoires de Montagne

Most of the image processing techniques have been first proposed and developed on small size images and progressively applied to larger and larger data sets resulting from new sensors and application requirements. In geosciences, digital cameras and remote sensing images can be used to monitor glaciers and to measure their surface velocity by different techniques. However, the image size and the number of acquisitions to be processed to analyze time series become a critical issue to derive displacement fields by the conventional correlation technique. In this paper, an efficient correlation software is used to compute from optical images the motion of a serac fall and from Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) images the motion of Alpine glaciers. The optical images are acquired by a digital camera installed near the Argentière glacier (Chamonix, France) and the SAR images are acquired by the high resolution TerraSAR-X satellite over the Mont-Blanc area. The results illustrate the potential of this software to monitor the glacier flow with camera images acquired every 2 h and with the size of the TerraSAR-X scenes covering 30 × 50 km2.

Domaines: Milieux et Changements globaux; Traitement du signal et de l'image [eess.SP]; Traitement du signal et de l'image [eess.SP]; Traitement des images [eess.IV]

Flavien Vernier, Renaud Fallourd, Jean-Michel Friedt, Yajing Yan, Emmanuel Trouvé, et al.. Glacier flow monitoring by digital camera and space-borne SAR images. Image Processing Theory, Tools and Applications (IPTA), 2012, Oct 2012, Turkey. pp.25 - 30, ⟨10.1109/IPTA.2012.6469541⟩. ⟨hal-00936106⟩