Coastline extraction from SAR images using spatial fuzzy clustering and the active contour method

Coastline extraction from synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data is difficult because of the presence of speckle noise and strong signal returns from the wind-roughened and wave-modulated sea surface. High resolution and weather change independent of SAR data lead to better monitoring of coastal sea. Therefore, SAR coastline extraction has taken up much interest. The active contour method is an efficient algorithm for the edge detection task; however, applying this method to high-resolution images is time-consuming. The current article presents an efficient approach to extracting coastlines from high-resolution SAR images. First, fuzzy clustering with spatial constraints is applied to the input SAR image. This clustering method is robust for noise and shows good performance with noisy images. Next, binarization is carried out using Otsu’s method on the fuzzification results. Third, morphological filters are used on the binary image to eliminate spurious segments after binarization. To extract the coastline, an active contour level set method is used on the initial contours and is applied to the input SAR image to refine the segmentation. Because the proposed approach is based on an active contour model, it does not require preprocessing for SAR speckle reduction. Another advantage of the proposed method is the ability to extract the coastline at full resolution of the input SAR image without degrading the resolution. The proposed approach does not require manual initialization for the level set method and the proposed initialization speeds up the level set evolution. Experimental results on low- and high-resolution SAR images showed good performance for coastline extraction. A criterion based on neighbourhood pixels for the coastline is proposed for the quantitative expression of the accuracy of the method.