Automatic delineation of shoreline and lake boundaries
from Landsat satellite images

Stefano Bagli, Pierre Soille

Joint Research Centre - European Commission, (EU)

Abstract

Motivated by the need to generate a pan-European coastline and water bodies database from Landsat 7 ETM+ images, we present a new methodology for extracting automatically the coastline and the lake boundaries.
Our approach consists of the combination of spectral and spatial information for the images using morphological image segmentation techniques. For these purposes several morphological segmentation algorithms were implemeted inside a GIS platform to evaluate their performance in coastline and lake boundaries extraction. Preliminary results for Ireland and UK demonstrate the accuracy of the developed methodology as well as it’s applicability to a large areas.