A Computer Vision Approach to Terminus Movement Analysis of Viedma Glacier

In this paper, an automatic segmentation approach of the Viedma glacier terminus is proposed. The method uses multi-spectral images from the Landsat-5 satellite to determine the area of the glacier through computer vision techniques. The area of the glacier is estimated, and a linear model is fitted, obtaining a correlation of 0.968 between the measured area and a fit linear regression model. On the other hand, a bio-inspired optical flow estimation approach is used to calculate and visualize the displacement of the glacier through time. In addition, an analysis is performed between the temperature variation in the Southern Cone and the decrease of the glacier in the function of time. A linear trend (r2=0.95) shows that the analyzed area of the glacier has decreased by about 1.9% annually in the observation season. It reveals an inverse relationship between the change in the size of the glacier and global warming, showing that if the same conditions remain, the glacier’s zone analyzed in this work would be close to its disappearance in around 70 years, the time lapse in which a global temperature increase of 1.24 oC would be reached.