Representation of desert sand dunes by surface orientations using Radon transform

Desert regions are typically characterized by the texture of sand that particular place and the orientation of dunes. We have attempted to visualize and quantify the sand dunes by local surface orientations calculated by Radon transform of sliding window region that covers entire image. This kind of representation can be used as a pre-processing step for segmentation and change detection of sand dunes. Hough transform, though traditionally used [1] to extract linear features is not very suitable for natural images. Radon transform on the other hand is robust to noise [2][3] comparatively and can effectively be used to find dune orientations. First of all an edge image is generated using canny operator or morphological operators and then local orientations are computed. Populations residing near desert land scapes have Livestock and marginal cultivation. To protect their interest´s administrative setup need to have accurate understanding of how the directions of sand dunes are changing with respect to time. It is seen that for desert environments, remotely sensed satellite imagery can reliably be used, to identify regions that are nontextured and with various dune orientations using radon transform.