Towards automatic detection of coastlines from satellite imagery

An approach towards automatic coastline detection from satellite imagery through edge detection techniques is presented. Linear transformations, such as Gaussian filtering and nonlinear transformations, such as median, adaptive and morphological filtering, are combined towards image smoothing and enhancement. Two edge detectors are applied, a morphological Laplacian operator and the classical Canny threshold detector. The coastline connectivity is recovered with a combination of nonlinear morphological transformations. The results appear promising.