Waterline mapping of inland great lake with subpixel accuracy from GF-3 SAR images

High-accuracy waterline mapping with Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) images is a challenging task because of the inhomogeneities of SAR imagery caused by the speckle noise and complex terrain. This paper presents a novel method for waterline mapping with subpixel accuracy. The proposed method mainly consists of three steps. Firstly, an improved Non-Local filter is adapted to suppress the speckle noise. Secondly, a Fuzzy C-Means (FCM) clustering algorithm is used to extract the pixel-level waterline. Thirdly, along the pixel-level waterline, a novel subpixel-scale waterline extraction method based on bicubic convolution and Geometric Active Contour (GAC) model is presented to further improve the accuracy of the waterline. Without loss of generality, the Danjiangkou reservoir (DJKR), which is the largest artificial freshwater lake in Asia, is selected as a study case. SAR images from Chinese GaoFen-3 (GF-3) satellite working on different modes are processed to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

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