For maritime remote sensing, coastline detection is a vital task. With continuous coastline detection results from satellite
image time series, the actual shoreline, the sea level, and environmental parameters can be observed to support coastal
management and disaster warning. Established coastline detection methods are often based on SAR images and wellknown
image processing approaches. These methods involve a lot of complicated data processing, which is a big
challenge for remote sensing time series. Additionally, a number of SAR satellites operating with polarimetric
capabilities have been launched in recent years, and many investigations of target characteristics in radar polarization
have been performed. In this paper, a fast and efficient coastline detection method is proposed which comprises three
steps. First, we calculate a modified correlation coefficient of two SAR images of different polarization. This coefficient
differs from the traditional computation where normalization is needed. Through this modified approach, the separation
between sea and land becomes more prominent. Second, we set a histogram-based threshold to distinguish between sea
and land within the given image. The histogram is derived from the statistical distribution of the polarized SAR image
pixel amplitudes. Third, we extract continuous coastlines using a Canny image edge detector that is rather immune to
speckle noise. Finally, the individual coastlines derived from time series of .SAR images can be checked for changes.
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