New AI model can map giant icebergs 10,000 times faster than humans: Study

London, Nov 9: A team of British scientists have trained an Artificial Intelligence (AI) system to accurately map -- in one-hundredth of a second -- the surface area and outline of giant icebergs captured on satellite images.

It is a major advance on existing automated systems which struggle to distinguish icebergs from other features in the image.

Manual - or human - interpretation of the image is more accurate but it can take several minutes to delineate the outline of a single iceberg.

If that has to be repeated numerous times, the process quickly becomes time-consuming and laborious, said the team from the University of Leeds, UK.

“Icebergs exist in hard-to-reach parts of the world and satellites are not only a fantastic tool to observe where they are, they can help scientists understand the process of how they melt and eventually begin to break apart,” said Dr Anne Braakmann-Folgmann, who led the study while undertaking doctoral research at the Centre for Polar Observation and Monitoring at the University of Leeds.

“Using the new AI system overcomes some of the problems with existing automated approaches, which can struggle to distinguish between icebergs and other ice floating on the sea or even a nearby coastline, which are present in the same image,” she added.

The team used an algorithm called U-net – a type of neural network -- to “train” a computer to accurately map the outline of icebergs from images taken by Sentinel-1 satellites operated by the European Space Agency.