Automatic water canal detection in multispectral satellite images

In this paper, a method for automatically detecting water regions and classifying water canals containing water in high resolution multispectral satellite images in a rule based manner is proposed. As water canals may be of different lengths and widths, indices employed in the literature and image gradients are used adaptively to classify water regions. The well known spatial properties of water canals are used to determine the water canals among the extracted water regions. The proposed algorithm is tested on high resolution multispectral satellite images covering large areas and satisfactory results are obtained.