CCESAR: Coastline Classification-Extraction From SAR Images Using CNN-U-Net Combination

Abstract

In this article, we improve the deep learning solution for coastline extraction from Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) images by proposing a two-stage model involving image classification followed by segmentation. We hypothesize that a single segmentation model usually used for coastline detection is insufficient to characterize different coastline types. We demonstrate that the need for a two-stage workflow prevails through different compression levels of these images. Our results from experiments using a combination of CNN and U-Net models on Sentinel-1 images show that the two-stage workflow, coastline classification-extraction from SAR images (CCESAR) outperforms a single U-Net segmentation model.