Development of Shoreline Extraction Method Based on Spatial Pattern Analysis of Satellite SAR Images

Abstract

The extensive monitoring of shorelines is becoming important for investigating the impact of coastal erosion. Satellite synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images can cover wide areas independently of weather or time. The recent development of high-resolution satellite SAR images has made observations more detailed. Shoreline extraction using high-resolution images, however, is challenging because of the influence of speckle, crest lines, patterns in sandy beaches, etc. We develop a shoreline extraction method based on the spatial pattern analysis of satellite SAR images. The proposed method consists of image decomposition, smoothing, sea and land area segmentation, and shoreline refinement. The image decomposition step, in which the image is decomposed into its texture and outline components, is based on morphological component analysis. In the image decomposition step, a learning process involving spatial patterns is introduced. The outline images are smoothed using a non-local means filter, and then the images are segmented into sea and land areas using the graph cuts’ technique. The boundary between these two areas can be regarded as the shoreline. Finally, the snakes algorithm is applied to refine the position accuracy. The proposed method is applied to the satellite SAR images of coasts in Japan. The method can successfully extract the shorelines. Through experiments, the performance of the proposed method is confirmed.

Keywords

• shoreline extraction
• satellite SAR images
• spatial pattern
• morphological component analysis
• graph cuts segmentation
• active contours