Although ridge tracing has the advantages of continuity and high positioning accuracy compared with other edge-based methods, it is difficult to use ridge tracing to extract coastlines from Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) images because of the speckle noise that occurs in SAR images. This paper presents a new coastline extraction method for SAR images based on a more robust ridge tracing method. First, according to the statistical properties of the pixel intensities in the land and sea regions in a SAR image, an edge magnitude map that characterizes the boundary between them is produced by the ratio of the variance to the mean such that the magnitude at the land-sea boundary is much higher than that at other locations. Second, the pixel with the maximum magnitude in the map is adopted as the starting point for tracing, and strip windows, which reduce tracing failures, are adopted to obtain different average magnitudes corresponding to the eight neighborhood pixels around the starting point. Then, the neighborhood pixel with the maximum magnitude is adopted as the next tracing point. The above procedure is repeated to determine the direction of the next point. This process achieves part of the tracing operation. The complete coastline is then extracted by performing the other part of the tracing operation. The experimental results show that the proposed method is more robust than traditional methods, and we demonstrate its effectiveness with RADARSAT-2 and Sentinel-1A data.

The rapid and accurate detection of urban water is critical for urban management, river detection, and flood disaster assessment. This study is devoted to detecting water by GaoFen-3 (GF-3) Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) images with high spatial resolution. There have been no effective solutions that discriminate water and building shadows using a single SAR image in previous research. Inspired by the principle that every shadow has a corresponding building nearby, a new method is proposed in this study, whereby building shadows are removed depending on the correspondence of buildings and their shadows. The proposed method is demonstrated effective and efficient by experimental results on six GF-3 SAR images. The Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) curves of the water detection results indicate that the proposed method increases the Probability of Detection (PD) to 98.36% and decreases the Probability of False Alarm (PFA) to 1.91% compared with the thresholding method, where, at the same PFA level, the maximum PD of the thresholding method is 72.62% in all testing samples. The proposed method is capable of removing building shadows and detecting water with high precision in urban areas, which presents the great potential of high-spatial-resolution GF-3 images in terms of water resource management.