SCM-Net: a lightweight AI-based sea-ice classification for climate change

Sea ice is considered one of the most valuable sources of information for maintaining the balance of Earth’s climate system and preventing excessive warming. This study introduces a lightweight yet accurate model designed for real time sea ice classification to provide an accessible and practical tool for operational use.
This paper proposes the SCM-Net, a deep learning model for sea ice classification applications, and compares its performance against other state-of-the-art models, including MobileNet, Residual Network (ResNet), Visual Geometry Group Network(VGGNet), Vision Transformers (ViT), and Shifted Window Transformers(SwinT). The SwinTransformer Convolutional Hybrid model(SCM-Net) is a lightweight model with around 45 times less parameters, enabling usage in real time applications. The results demonstrate that the proposed SCM-Net model achieves a comparable and even better accuracy in Comparison to other models. The other most important contributions of this research is that the proposed model significantly reduces the number of parameters while improving inference efficiency. These results shows that the proposed model is well suited for real time sea ice classification applications.