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

arXiv cs.CV / 3/17/2026

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Key Points

  • The paper introduces a weakly supervised deep learning pipeline that fuses Sentinel-1 SAR and AMSR-2 radiometry data with a U-Net architecture trained with a region-based loss to improve pixel-level high-resolution sea ice segmentation from coarse region labels.
  • It proposes Analytical Logit Scaling applied post-inference to overcome under-confidence from weak labels by dynamically calculating temperature and bias based on the latent space percentiles (2% and 98%) of each scene, enabling physical binarization of predictions.
  • This scaling acts as a topological extractor, enabling the detection of fine-grained sea ice fractures (leads) at 40-meter resolution without any manual pixel-level annotations.
  • The method preserves regional macroscopic ice concentrations while achieving 78% accuracy on highly fragmented summer scenes, bridging weak supervision and high-resolution physical segmentation.
  • Overall, the work advances weakly supervised segmentation for satellite-based ice mapping with potential applications in Arctic navigation and climate monitoring.

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.