River Planform Extraction From High-Resolution SAR Images Via Generalised Gamma Distribution Superpixel Classification

The extraction of river planforms from remotely sensed satellite images is a task of crucial importance to many applications such as land planning, water resource monitoring or flood prediction. In this paper we present a novel framework
for the extraction of rivers from Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) images, based on superpixel segmentation and subsequent classification. Superpixel segmentation is achieved via a modelling of the image pixels’ amplitudes and spatial coordinates as a finite mixture model, where the Generalised Gamma distribution is used to accurately model a variety of high-resolution SAR
scenes. A number of features describing texture and statistics are extracted on a superpixel level, facilitating the identification of river superpixels - planforms are then extracted via unsupervised, agglomerative clustering thus eliminating the need for labelled training data. We present results of our proposed method on ICEYE-X2 and SENTINEL-1 SAR data demonstrating its ability to produce pixel-accurate river masks.