Antarstick: Extracting Snow Height From Time-Lapse Photography

Abstract

The evolution and accumulation of snow cover are among the most important characteristics influencing Antarctica's climate and biotopes. The changes in Antarctica are also substantially impacting global climate change. Therefore, detailed monitoring of snow evolution is key to understanding such changes. One way to conduct this monitoring is by installing trail cameras in a particular region and then processing the captured information. This option is affordable, but has some drawbacks, such as the fully automatic solution for the extraction of snow height from these images is not feasible. Therefore, it still requires human intervention, manually correcting the inaccurately extracted information. In this paper, we present Antarstick, a tool for visual guidance of the user to potentially wrong values extracted from poor-quality images and support for their interactive correction. This tool allows for much quicker and semi-automated processing of snow height from time-lapse photography.