An object based approach for coastline extraction from Quickbird multispectral images

Because of the reduced dimensions of pixels, in the last years high resolution satellite images (Quickbird, IKONOS, GeoEye, …..) are considered very important data to extract information for coastline monitoring and engineering opera planning. They can integrate detail topographic maps and aerial photos so to contribute to modifications recognition and coastal dynamics reconstruction. Many studies have been carried out on coastline detection from high resolution satellite images: unsupervised and supervised classification, segmentation, NDVI (Normalized Difference Vegetation Index) and NDWI (Normalized Difference Water Index) are only some of the methodological aspects that have been already considered and experimented. This paper is aimed to implement an object based approach to extract coastline from Quickbird multispectral imagery. Domitian area near Volturno River mouth in Campania Region (Italy), an interesting zone for its dynamics and evolution, is considered. Object based approach is developed for automatic detection of coastline from Quickbird imagery using the Feature Extraction Workflow implemented in ENVI Zoom software. The resulting vector polyline is performed using the smoothing algorithm named PAEK (Polynomial Approximation with Exponential Kernel).