Gaussian Field Current Estimation from Drift Sea Ice Tracking with the Labeled Multi-Bernoulli Filter

Abstract

In polar region operations, drift sea ice positioning and tracking is useful for both scientific and safety reasons. Modeling ice movements has proven difficult, not least due to the lack of information of currents and winds of high enough resolution. Thus, observations of drift ice is essential to an up-to-date ice-tracking estimate. As an inverse problem, it is possible to extract current and wind estimates from the tracked objects of a Multi-Target Tracking (MTT) filter. By inserting the track estimates into a Gaussian field, we obtain a two-dimensional current estimate over a region of interest. We also discuss the area affected by each track estimate. The algorithm is applied to a Terrestrial Radar Interferometer (TRI) dataset from Kongsfjorden, Svalbard, to show the practical application of the current estimation.