Coastline Extraction from SAR Images Using Robust Ridge Tracing

Abstract

Although ridge tracing has the advantages of continuity and high positioning accuracy compared with other edge-based methods, it is difficult to use ridge tracing to extract coastlines from Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) images because of the speckle noise that occurs in SAR images. This paper presents a new coastline extraction method for SAR images based on a more robust ridge tracing method. First, according to the statistical properties of the pixel intensities in the land and sea regions in a SAR image, an edge magnitude map that characterizes the boundary between them is produced by the ratio of the variance to the mean such that the magnitude at the land-sea boundary is much higher than that at other locations. Second, the pixel with the maximum magnitude in the map is adopted as the starting point for tracing, and strip windows, which reduce tracing failures, are adopted to obtain different average magnitudes corresponding to the eight neighborhood pixels around the starting point. Then, the neighborhood pixel with the maximum magnitude is adopted as the next tracing point. The above procedure is repeated to determine the direction of the next point. This process achieves part of the tracing operation. The complete coastline is then extracted by performing the other part of the tracing operation. The experimental results show that the proposed method is more robust than traditional methods, and we demonstrate its effectiveness with RADARSAT-2 and Sentinel-1A data.

Keywords:

• Coastline extraction
• edge detection
• edge magnitude
• SAR image
• tracing

Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful to ESA for providing large-volume SAR-derived data. They are also thankful to the anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments that greatly helped in improving this paper. In addition, Dailiang Wang would like to thank his mother, whose encouragement and support helped him overcome one dilemma after another for a long time.