A New Simple Procedure for Extracting Coastline from SAR Image Based on Low Pass Filter and Edge Detection Algorithm

Abstract

This study proposes a new simple procedure for extracting coastline from Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) images by utilizing a low-pass filter and edge detection algorithm. The low-pass filter is used to improve the histogram of the pixel value of the SAR image. It provides better distribution of pixel value and makes it easy to separate between sea and land surfaces. This study provides the processing steps using open-source software, i.e., SNAP SAR processor and QGIS application. This procedure has been tested using dual polarization Sentinel-1 (10x10 meters resolution) and single polarization ALOS-2 (3x3 meters resolution) dataset. The results show that using Sentinel-1 with dual polarization (VH) provides a better result than single polarization (VV). In the ALOS-2 case, only single polarization (HH) is available. However, even using only HH polarization, ALOS-2 provides a good result. In terms of resolution, ALOS-2 provides a better coastline than Sentinel-1 data due to ALOS-2 has better resolution. This procedure is expected to be helpful to detect coastline changes and for coastal area management.