Strategies for the Automatic Extraction of Water Bodies from TerraSAR-X / TanDEM-X data

Medium-resolution SAR satellite data have been widely used for water and flood mapping in recent years. Since the beginning of 2008 high-resolution radar data with up to 1 m pixel spacing of the TerraSAR-X satellite are operationally available. Due to the improved resolution of the sensor more details of the Earth’s surface become visible. A number of different appearances of water bodies in TerraSAR-X data are shown that are relevant for a general water mapping concept. Existing water body detection approaches that have been applied to medium-resolution SAR data are reviewed with regard to their applicability for TerraSAR-X data. As a complementary mission to TerraSAR-X the launch of TanDEM-X is planned for October 2009. The data of both satellites will be used to generate a global DEM (Digital Elevation Model) with an interferometric data acquisition concept. As a byproduct to the DEM data set a global water mask will be derived from the SAR data. The concept for this water detection process within the TanDEM-X project is introduced in this paper.

[1]  Sankar K. Pal,et al.  A review on image segmentation techniques , 1993, Pattern Recognit..

[2]  Walter H. F. Smith,et al.  A global, self‐consistent, hierarchical, high‐resolution shoreline database , 1996 .

[3]  S. Walsh,et al.  Modeling floodplain inundation using an integrated GIS with radar and optical remote sensing , 1998 .

[4]  Matthew S. Horritt,et al.  A statistical active contour model for SAR image segmentation , 1999, Image Vis. Comput..

[5]  Alberto Refice,et al.  Comparison of SAR amplitude vs. coherence flood detection methods - a GIS application , 2000 .

[6]  R. Heremans,et al.  Automatic detection of flooded areas on ENVISAT/ASAR images using an object-oriented classification technique and an active contour algorithm , 2003, International Conference on Recent Advances in Space Technologies, 2003. RAST '03. Proceedings of.

[7]  J. Henry,et al.  Envisat multi‐polarized ASAR data for flood mapping , 2006 .

[8]  Gerhard Krieger,et al.  The TanDEM-X Mission Concept , 2006, 2006 IEEE International Symposium on Geoscience and Remote Sensing.

[9]  Gerhard Krieger,et al.  TanDEM-X: A Satellite Formation for High-Resolution SAR Interferometry , 2006, IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing.

[10]  Patrick Matgen,et al.  Integration of SAR-derived river inundation areas, high-precision topographic data and a river flow model toward near real-time flood management , 2007, Int. J. Appl. Earth Obs. Geoinformation.

[11]  A. Roth,et al.  Design of the DEM Mosaicking and Calibration Processor for TanDEM-X , 2008 .

[12]  Sandro Martinis,et al.  Towards operational near real-time flood detection using a split-based automatic thresholding procedure on high resolution TerraSAR-X data , 2009 .