An automatic coastline extraction method based on active contour model

Coastline extraction from remote sensing images has become an indispensable means in island coastal remote sensing survey, which plays a very important role in automatic navigation, targeting and mapping work. Image segmentation and boundary extraction are important ways to obtain the position of coastline. And active contour model has become an important tool for image segmentation and boundary extraction. So in this paper we try to use active contour model to extract coastline. However excessive timeconsumption and low degree of automation are two aspects we need to resolve. Aiming to this, we use quadtreemethod to obtain an initial contour, which is close to the coastline, and then evolve to calculate the accurate result. Experiments show that the method is stable, reliable and practical.