An effective method to extract coastline from dual-polarimetric C- and X-band SAR measurements

This study proposes a new method to extract coastline from dual-polarimetric SAR data. The method is based on the correlation between co- and cross-polarized amplitude channels and it allows extracting coastline in an unsupervised and effective way. Experiments, undertaken on SAR data collected by RadarSAT-2, Sentinel-1 and COSMO-SkyMed over a challenging test area that includes a large sandy beach, confirm the soundness of the method which is shown to be both effective (a whole SAR scene is processed in seconds) and accurate (the mean error is less than 5/7 pixels for RadarSAT-2/COSMOSkyMed).