Detecting Water Bodies on RADARSAT Imagery

This paper presents a novel geodesic active contour (GAC) model based on an edge detector for rapid detection of water bodies from spaceborne synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imagery with high speckle noise. The original edge indicator function based on gradients is replaced by an edge indicator function based on the ratio of exponentially weighted averages (ROEWA) operator. Thus, the capability of edge detection and the accuracy of locating edges are greatly improved, which makes the model more appropriate for SAR images. In addition, an enhancing term is added to the original model’s energy function in order to boost the strength for the contour’s evolution. An unconditionally stable additive operator splitting (AOS) scheme and a fast algorithm for re-initialization of the level set function are adopted, which not only enhances the model’s stability, but also speeds up the model’s convergence remarkably. The experimental results on simulated and real RADARSAT-1/-2 images show its efficiency and accuracy.