Sea Ice Motion Estimation Algorithm Using Computer Vision for The Sea Ice Dynamic Experiment (SIDEx) Field Campaign, Alaska, 2021

The Sea Ice Dynamics Experiment (SIDEx) was a field campaign in the Beaufort Sea from February to April 2021. The field experiment was designed to investigate the interaction of ice stress, strain, and fracture over meter-to-kilometer (m-km) spatial scales as ice fractured and subsequently deformed. Observations were collected in situ at an ice camp, using autonomous buoys, and with remote sensing. Observations were collected over a variety of scales, including scales larger than the target m-km scale. This dataset is one facet of the multi-modal data package collected together in this parent archive.
This dataset contains horizontal displacement data for Arctic sea ice, derived from 54 RADARSAT-2 ScanSAR images. The images were downsampled to a uniform resolution of 50 meters (m) and centered around one drifting buoy located close to the main camp. Using the Scale-Invariant Feature Transform (SIFT) algorithm for feature detection and matching, followed by iterative Farneback Optical Flow, where dense motion estimation was performed for each pixel. The dataset includes NetCDF files with georeferenced displacement data at the pixel level, enabling detailed analysis and visualization of sea ice dynamics.