Implementation of Digital Image Processing for Coastline Extraction from Synthetic Aperture Radar Imagery

Extraction of the coastal boundary is important because the boundary serves as a reference in the demarcation of maritime zones such as territorial sea, contiguous zone, and exclusive economic zone. Accurate nautical charts also depend on well established, accurate, consistent, and current coastline delineation. However, to identify the precise location of the coastal boundary is a difficult task due to tidal and wave motions. This paper presents an efficient way to extract coastlines by applying digital image processing techniques to Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) imagery. Over the past few years, satellite-based SAR and high resolution airborne SAR images have become available, and SAR has been evaluated as a new mapping technology. Using remotely sensed data gives benefits in several aspects, especially SAR is largely unaffected by weather constraints, is operational at night time over a large area, and provides high contrast between water and land areas. Various image processing techniques including region growing, texture-based image segmentation, local entropy method, and refinement with image pyramid were implemented to extract the coastline in this study. Finally, the results were compared with existing coastline data derived from aerial photographs.