A
system for extracting
glacier boundaries using
multiparametric analysis, consisting of: a
data acquisition module configured to acquire
Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) data of a glacial region; a
data processing unit configured to process the SAR data to generate coherence images and
backscatter intensity maps, to extract
terrain parameters including slope and curvature information from a
digital elevation model (DEM), to apply thresholds to the coherence images,
backscatter intensity maps, and
terrain parameters, to generate a multi-band stack comprising the thresholded coherence images, the thresholded
backscatter intensity maps, the thresholded slope information, and the curvature information, and a
principal component analysis module configured to standardize the multi-band stack, calculate a
covariance matrix from the standardized data, calculate
eigenvalues and eigenvectors of the
covariance matrix, and transform the
original data into a principal component space with reduced dimensionality; a
texture feature extraction module configured to calculate first- and second-order statistics from the output of the
principal component analysis; generating a
texture feature set comprising at least one of the following: sum average, entropy, difference entropy, sum entropy, variance, difference variance, inverse difference moment, contrast, correlation, information measures of correlation, and maximum
correlation coefficient; a
connected component segmentation module configured to: convert the set of textural features into a binary format that distinguishes
glacier ice from the background; group spatially connected pixels of similar intensity into segments; extract a vector shape file corresponding to the
glacier boundary; an output generation module configured to generate a glacier boundary delineation output; and a
user interface having a display configured to display the output generated by the output generation module.