Sea Ice Classification with GaoFen-3 Fully Polarimetric SAR and Landsat Optical Data

As a critical indicator of polar ecosystem dynamics, sea ice monitoring plays a pivotal role in climate change. However, as global warming accelerates the melting of sea ice, the complexity in the Arctic poses growing challenges for achieving high-precision sea ice classification. To address this issue, this study begins with the creation of a multi-source sea ice dataset based on GaoFen-3 fully polarimetric SAR data and Landsat optical imagery. In addition, the study proposes a Global–Local enhanced Deformable Convolution Network (GLDCN), which effectively captures long-range semantic dependencies and fine-grained local features of sea ice. To further enhance feature integration, an Adaptive Channel Attention Module (ACAM) is designed to achieve adaptive weighted fusion of heterogeneous SAR and optical features, substantially improving the model’s discriminative ability in complex conditions. Experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms several mainstream models on multiple evaluation metrics. The multi-source data fusion strategy significantly reduces misclassification among confusable categories, validating the importance of multimodal fusion in sea ice classification.