Coastline detection based on polarimetric characteristics and mathematical morphology using PolSAR images

A coastline detection method for PolSAR image, which uses polarimetric characteristics and mathematical morphology, is proposed in this paper. In this method, both intensity and orientation angle are used to separate sea water and land. Then, in order to reduce the impact of cultivated land affection during aforementioned process, i.e., fuzzy boundary and small cavities, mathematical morphology is utilized for better coastline processing. Experiments are conducted over the UAVSAR L-band PolSAR data. The results show that the proposed method can effectively and accurately detect the coastline in PolSAR images.