A Method of Coastline Detection from High-Resolution Remote Sensing Images Based on the Improved Snake Model

Abstract

While executing tasks such as ocean pollution monitoring, maritime rescue, geographic mapping, ship localization, cruise missile guidance and automatic navigation utilizing remote sensing images, the coastline feature should be determined. Traditional methods are not satisfactory to extract coastline in high-resolution panchromatic remote sensing image. Active contour model, also called snakes, have proven useful for interactive specification of image contours, so it is used as an effective coastlines extraction technique. Firstly, coastlines are detected by water segmentation and boundary tracking, which are considered initial contours to be optimized through active contour model. As better energy functions are developed, the power assist of snakes becomes effective. New internal energy has been done to reduce problems caused by convergence to local minima, and new external energy can greatly enlarge the capture region around features of interest. After normalization processing, energies are iterated using greedy algorithm to accelerate convergence rate. The experimental results encompassed examples in images and demonstrated the capabilities and efficiencies of the improvement.