An Efficient Segmentation Method for Mariculture Areas on Airborne SAR Images

Abstract

In this paper, the problems of mariculture area segmentation and corresponding area value estimations are investigated on the basis of airborne synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images. In order to deal with a limited amount of noisy airborne SAR image data in an efficient way, an effective coarse-to-fine approach is proposed, consisting of three major components, including (1) an adaptive segmentation method for each local patch to remove noise from the ocean background, (2) a dynamic coarse-to-fine clustering method for grouping pixels to achieve image segments, and (3) a polygon-fitting-based algorithm to obtain regular borders for each region and corresponding area value. Some feasible experiments are operated based on the restricted airborne SAR images, and the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm is validated in terms of the provided pixel level evaluation annotations.

Marine Infrastructure Detection with Satellite Data—A Review

“…Object-oriented or OBIA was used in 14 of the studies (15%). These used multiscale [40,55,75], adaptive threshold [90,94,109,114], rule-based [78] or level-set segmentation [44,45]. In two cases, multi-scale-based neighbor information classification (MNIC) [34,86] and in one case object-based visually salient (OBVS) NDVI [56] were used as a thresholding technique.…”

“…To our surprise, eight studies named the sensor they used for their study, but did not provide any detailed information about which years the images were from and some also do not mention how many satellite images they used for their research [39,49,50,57,90,91,103,114].…”

“…When looking at the reviewed articles and the data used, it quickly becomes apparent that almost exclusively spaceborne platforms were used (95%). Only two studies used airborne platforms [93,114]; one study used airborne in combination with spaceborne [45] and another one used a UAV in addition to spaceborne [84]. Based on the findings from Section 3.3 and the previous figure that most publications focus on smaller proof-of-concept and method development studies rather than large-scale applications, it would have been assumed that some more of the studies would use airborne platforms.…”

“…The fields of application and infrastructures detected with radar data are diverse. Of the total of 32 reviewed articles (35%), aquaculture was identified in 11 [39,49,50,59,62,67,68,70,93,114,115], platforms in 18 [14,17,38,43,[95][96][97][98][99][100][101][104][105][106], OWFs in five [41,42,51,107,108], and bridges in 2 [44,45]. The one study that used hyperspectral satellite data used them to detect aquaculture [64].…”