Coastline extraction in remotely sensed images by means of texture features analysis

An innovative technique for the detection of the coastline in remotely sensed images is presented. In a previous version of the method a connectivity map was computed by simply considering the grey levels and the physical distance between pixels in the image. The results obtained by processing different kinds of remotely sensed data clearly showed that it is possible to correctly detect the shoreline position only if the sea portion is really homogeneous. By using this approach, problems arise when sources of non-homogeneity are present in the image. An improved version of the method has been implemented, which involves texture features, instead of the simple gray level, in order to compute the connectivity map. By operating in this way it is possible to better take into account the spatial variability of data as an information source.