Investigation of fusion of SAR and Landsat data for shoreline super resolution mapping: The northeastern mediterranean sea coast in Egypt

Abstract

A shoreline is defined as the line of contact between land and water surface. Shoreline extraction/mapping is critical in many coastal zone applications such as safe navigation and coastal environmental protection. Digitizing a feature such as the coastline is a very tedious and time-consuming operation. In this research shoreline mapping at a sub-pixel and pixel levels was evaluated in the northern part of the coastal zone of Egypt (Port Said). Three different image fusion techniques have been used to merge two co-registered data, radar (Radarsat) and optical (Landsat), to improve the classification accuracy. Spatial, spectral, and radiometric qualities of the fused images have been evaluated. The resulted three fused images, the Landsat and Radarsat images, were fed to the fuzzy and the maximum likelihood classifiers where the classification delineated two classes; water and nonwater. The accuracy of the classified images was estimated based on a reference data. After classification, the results have been compared where it was found that image fusion has improved the classification accuracy and the accuracy of the fuzzy classification is better than the maximum likelihood classification in all cases. The best resulted classified image from the ten cases is that obtained from the fused Radarsat-Landsat images using IHS technique that was classified with the fuzzy classifier. Shoreline has been extracted from the (IHS-fuzzy), (SAR-fuzzy), and (Landsatfuzzy). Experimental results showed that the shoreline extraction accuracy is dramatically improved by the effective image fusion of Landsat and SAR data. The accuracies of the extracted shorelines from (Landsat-fuzzy), (Radarsat-fuzzy), and (IHS-fuzzy) data based on twenty differential GPS check points are estimated to be 5.69, 5.26, and 5.14 m, respectively. The three shorelines extracted/mapped from (Landsat-fuzzy), (Radarsatfuzzy), (IHS-fuzzy) data were compared to a reference shoreline. The RMS has been computed related to thirty checkpoints on the reference shoreline. The accuracies of the extracted shorelines from (Landsat-fuzzy), (SAR-fuzzy), and (IHS-fuzzy) data are estimated to be 8.3, 7.27, and 6.75 m, respectively. The positional quality of the extracted shorelines (using generalization factor) from (Landsat-fuzzy), (SAR-fuzzy), and (IHS-fuzzy) data are estimated to be 0.977, 0.986, and 0.999, respectively. © The Author(s) 2010.