Evaluation of Geospatial Tools for Generating Accurate Glacier Velocity Maps from Optical Remote Sensing Data

Changes in the dynamics of the glacier must be assessed as they are important for the sea level changes. Glacier velocity is the most important parameter used in the glacier dynamics studies. Various image matching techniques based on different domains have been utilized to estimate the velocity of the glaciers since the first use of remote sensing technology. The present study has focused to derive precise velocity of the Polar Record Glacier, east Antarctica, in the recent years using optical remote sensing. The secondary objective of the study is to comparatively test the accurate geospatial tool for the velocity estimation. The study was first conducted on a single image pair and four different tools were used for estimation of glacier velocity, which are COSI-Corr tool in ENVI, IMGRAFT in Matlab, IMCORR feature tracking tool in SAGA-GIS and CIAS image correlation software. After evaluation of all the four feature tracking tools, COSI-Corr yielded pixel level velocity with both magnitude and directions, while IMGRAFT provided the speed of the glaciers without the directions. On the other hand, IMCORR provided good results with magnitude and directions of glacier velocity but pixel wise magnitude was not produced. CIAS also provided closely bundled velocity products but the pixel wise velocity was not obtained. COSI-Corr and IMGRAFT were found out to be the best of four tools in which COSI-Corr was preferred for further studies to estimate velocity of Polar Record Glacier.