Interactive System for Coastline Extraction in Sar Images

The aim of this work is to develop a prototype system, that is a software tool that contributes to monitor the coastline. In fact it, constituted by a set of techniques and methods for SAR (Synthetic Aperture Radar) image segmentation, can aid to investigate the state of conservation of the coastal environment. The proposed system, called ISC (Interactive System for Coastline detection) and written in JAVA language, is composed by a set of Java classes structured in packages and it is based on the level set method applied to SAR images. In this method, an initial curve defined on the image evolves according to a PDE (Partial Differential Equation) model by means of a velocity whose mathematical expression is related to the characteristics of the image to be segmented. This curve is deformed until it assumes a stable position at the boundary of the area to be extracted from the image. We used images SAR PRI (Precision Image Resolution) acquired during the ERS2 (European Remote Sensing Satellite) mission.