Abstract
Recently, many research works on the icebreaking vessels have been published as the possibility of passing Arctic routes has been increasing. The model ship test on the pack ice model in the ice basin is actively carried out as a way to investigate the performance of icebreaking vessels. In this test, the concentration of pack ice is important since it directly affects the performance. However, it is difficult to measure the concentration because not only the pack ice has uneven shape but also it keeps floating around in the basin. In this paper, an algorithm to identify the concentration of pack ice is introduced. From a digital image of pack ice obtained in the ice basin, the goal is to measure the area of pack ice using an image processing technique. Instead of the general global binarization that yields numerical errors in this problem, a local binarization technique, coupled with image subdivision based on the quadtree structure, is developed. The concentration results obtained by the developed algorithm are compared with the manually measured data to prove its accuracy.
