SAR-Driven Time Variability Analysis of the Coastline of the Lake Ptuj, Slovenia

This study is to discuss the ability of dual polarimetric (VH and VV) Sentinel-1 synthetic aperture radar (SAR) measurements to track the time-variability of the coastline of an inland water basin. The proposed approach consists of estimating the coastlines using a time series of dual-polarimetric SAR scenes through a dual-polarization metric, namely the inter-channel correlation. Then, the extracted coastlines are superimposed to the digital elevation model of the area of interest to jointly exploit the retreat/accretion information (extracted from the coastlines) and the scene topography. Experimental results refer to the Lake Ptuj, in the east of Slovenia and are obtained processing a time series of Sentinel-1 synthetic aperture radar imagery, collected under the ascending pass, in the period between 2015 and 2024. Two showcases obtained considering two SAR scenes separated by a 9-year baseline, are here shown to demonstrate the soundness of the proposed approach. Based on the experimental results, it is concluded that the proposed algorithm for Sentinel-1 demonstrate well in the detection of coastline and efficiently differentiate between water and land boundaries over the span examined in this study.