Water/land segmentation in SAR images using level sets

This paper presents a method for the separation between land and water in SAR amplitude images. The proposed technique uses region based level sets and adopts a mixture of log-normal densities as the probabilistic model for the pixel intensities in both the water and the land regions. The expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm is used to estimate the probability density functions in each region. Experimental results with real SAR data are provided to illustrate the performance of the proposed algorithm.