Classification of Sea Ice Based on Fuzzy Clustering with Spatial Information

Bohai Sea, due to its proximity to China´s capital Beijing, is one of the busiest seaways in the world. The worst sea ice over the past four decades has covered over 40 percent of the waters of Bohai during this February and March, according to the National Marine Environmental Forecasting Center (NMEFC). The ice has affected marine transport, fishing, aquatic breeding and offshore mining in the area around Bohai Sea and caused billions yuan of losses. So monitoring the changes of the sea ice is very important to the sea´s daily life. For this paper, we developed a brief approach base on Fuzzy clustering along with spatial information, using the 1 km resolution images from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA´s Aqua satellite, which could be used to detect the area of the sea-ice. Compared with the other fuzzy clustering algorithms, our algorithm shows that the distribute of the sea-ice is more continuous and smooth.