English

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

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition 2026-03-17 v1

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.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2603.13573,
  title  = {Analytical Logit Scaling for High-Resolution Sea Ice Topology Retrieval from Weakly Labeled SAR Imagery},
  author = {Reda Elwaradi and Julien Gimenez and Stéphane Hordoir and Mehdi Ait Hamma and Adrien Chan-Hon-Tong and Flora Weissgerber},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2603.13573},
  year   = {2026}
}