Coastline Extraction Using Dual-Polarimetric COSMO-SkyMed PingPong Mode SAR Data

A two-step physically consistent procedure is proposed to exploit COSMO-SkyMed (CSK) synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data acquired in the incoherent dual-polarization PingPong mode. The first step, which deals with land/sea discrimination, is accomplished in a robust and effective way by exploiting the inherent peculiarities of the CSK PingPong mode. Hence, a dual-polarization scattering model that relates the correlation between the HH and VV CSK polarimetric channels to the coherence time of the observed scene is first proposed. The second step, which deals with the extraction of the continuous coastline, is accomplished by a simple image processing that consists of extracting intermediate frequency components using two Gaussian-shaped filters. Experiments undertaken over actual CSK single-look slant range complex PingPong HH/VV SAR data show the physical soundness of the proposed rationale and the processing effectiveness.