AUTOMATIC DETECTION Of NARROW OPEN WATER STREAMS IN AMAZON FORESTS FROM JERS-1 SAR IMAGERY

We extracted narrow open water streams from JERS-1 SAR images of the Amazon rain forest. The extracted range of these streams were almost comparable to a high level extraction of the same streams from near-IR images of JERS-1 VNIR data notwithstanding that these features in SAR images show the strong dependence of the observation angle. Large water bodies are relatively easy to extract from JERS-1 SAR images, as they tend to appear as very dark areas; but streams whose width is nearly equal to or less than the spatial resolution no longer appear as very dark features. By using strong scatterers distributed sparsely along the radar facing sides of the streams, we can successfully estimate approximate ranges of waterways and then extract relatively dark line-like features within these ranges.