FEASIBILITY OF IMAGE PROCESSING TECHNIQUES FOR LAKE LEVEL EXTRACTION WITH C-BAND SRTM DEM

Lake studies play an important role in water management, ecology, and other environmental issues. Typically, monitoring lake levels is the first step on the lake studies. However, for the Prairie Pothole Region (PPR) of North America having millions of small lakes and potholes, on-site measurement for lake levels is almost impossible with the conventional gage stations. Therefore, we employed Geographic Information System (GIS) and remote sensing approach with the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission data to extract lake levels. Several image processing techniques were used to extract lake levels for January, 2000 as a one-time snapshot which will be useful in historic lake level reconstruction. This study is associated with other remote sensing datasets such as Landsat imagery and Digital Orthophoto Quadrangle (DOQ). In this research, firstly, image processing techniques like FFT filtering, Lee-sigma, masking with Canny Edge Detector, and contouring were tested for lake level estimation. The semi-automated contouring technique was developed to accomplish the bulk processing for large amount of lakes in this region. Also, effectiveness of each method for bulk processing was evaluated.