Coastline Extraction Using SAR Images and Deep Learning

The status of coastal zones has a great impact on economy and population and, therefore, the monitoring of shoreline is a crucial task. In order to have a wide scale and rapid monitoring, remote sensing represents a perfect opportunity, In particular, the ability of working all day in any meteorological conditions makes Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) system attractive for such task. At the same time, the ability of rapidly processing huge data makes deep learning an appealing solution. The aim of this work is to examine the effectiveness and potential of utilizing a deep learning solution for identifying and extracting coastlines from satellite SAR images. Firstly, a specific training dataset has been created using SAR data and ancillary information for retrieving position of coastline. Finally, the shoreline extraction has been performed as deep learning based segmentation task.