A Coastline Detection Method in Polarimetric SAR Images Mixing the RegionRegion Based and Edge Edge-Based Active Contour Models
Abstract: This paper proposes a coastline detection method for polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images based on region region-based based and edge-based edge active contour models. It can be used to detect coastline accurately and fast. In this method, the region-based based and edge edge-based based active contour models are effectively combined by an important property of the likelihood ratio edge detector in polarimetric SAR images, which is proved by theory. Using low low-resolution resolution image obtained by multilook processing, we detect accurate and continued coarse coastlines by a region-based based level set meth method. od. The property of the likelihood ratio edge detector of polarimetric SAR images along the coastline region is then analyzed. The coarse detection result is finally refined using a fast snake active contour model based on the edge property. Polarimetric SSAR AR data acquired by RADARSAT-22 over a Singapore region and TerraSAR TerraSAR-X X over a Berkeley region are both used to test the proposed algorithm. The experimental results show that the coastline is fast and accurately detected in different initial scales. The proposed pro method greatly reduces the data processing time compared with the coastline detection method based on a single scale.