Session: 07-03-01 Arctic Frontier Regions

Paper Number: 125706

125706 - Multi Modal Mapping of Sea Ice Fields From Remote Shipborne Instrumentation 

We present an instrumentation system designed to create digital multi-modal maps of the sea ice surrounding ships operating in the Arctic. The system is equipped with a 3D LiDAR scanner and an optical camera to observe the ice fields and build the models. Calibration of the system makes it possible to enrich the pointclouds obtained from the LiDAR with RGB colors from the optical images by projecting measurements between the sensors. The presented system can continuously monitor the sea ice and build up sequential maps over long trajectories by running a navigation filter to estimate the system pose over time. An IMU-driven Error-State Kalman Filter (ESKF) is used for this purpose, where the error state is updated using ship heading measurements, GNSS positioning, and a pointcloud-based height estimator.

 

In the summer of 2023, the system was mounted on the Norwegian icebreaker Kronprins Haakon. Experimental data was collected while the ship was traveling around the Fram Strait and North Greenland Sea. We validate the ice field maps by reconstructing images using a pinole-camera model with parameters obtained from calibration. Qualitative comparisons between the reconstructed images and optical images show that the most prominent features of the sea ice are conserved, but that a moderate amount of noise reduces the precision of the map. We also suggest a set of quantitative metrics to describe the overall properties of the ice fields, enabling us to compare ice conditions over large temporal and spatial scales.

Presenting Author: Oskar Gjesdal Veggeland Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU)

Presenting Author Biography: In 2022, I finished my master's degree in engineering cybernetics at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. My specialization was on autonomous systems, and the diploma thesis was based on Visual Inertial Odometry where I got hands-on experience building a stereo camera and inertial system for navigation. In the fall of 2022, I started as a PhD candidate at the Department of Marine Technology where my research objective is to investigate a system to build high-fidelity digital models of sea ice fields close to ships operating in the Arctic. The work has been devoted to designing a remote sensing platform based on an optical camera and LiDAR sensor. This has been mounted on a Norwegian icebreaker in the summer of 2023, and analysis of the collected data is currently ongoing.

Authors:

Oskar Gjesdal Veggeland Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU)
Ekaterina Kim Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU)
Roger Skjetne Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU)