Abstract
The rising threat of climate change has raised the need for constant glacier surveillance, since their fast growth may pose an immediate danger to the environment and cause disasters. However, conventional approaches to glaciers' monitoring are dependent on challenging and irregular manual analysis of satellite images. In this paper, a new combined methodology for automated glacier growth monitoring and risk assessment based on satellite imagery is introduced. The system combines a glacier segmentation model based on deep learning with a classification algorithm that utilizes ensemble machine learning to predict a risk level. The YOLOv8 segmentation network is used to identify the glacier outlines from a set of satellite images and generate masks to be further analyzed. The masks are used to extract features representing the glacier area, shape, and growth pattern, which are later used by a random forest and an extreme gradient boosting algorithm to determine the risk level by applying the soft-voting method. A real glacier lake dataset is used to test the system and demonstrate its performance and accuracy in identifying risky and non-risky growth.
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