Automatic matching of aerial coastline images with map data

Abstract

Matching aerial images with map data is an important task in remote sensing applications such as georeferencing, cartography and autonomous navigation of aerial vehicles. The most distinctive image features that can be used to accomplish this task are due to the unique structures of different coastline segments. In recent years several studies are conducted for detecting coastlines and matching them to map data. The results reported by these studies are far from being a complete solution, having weak points such as poor noise sensitivity, need for user interaction, dependence to a fixed scale and orientation.In this thesis, a two-step procedure involving automatic multiresolution coastline extraction and coastline matching using dynamic programming have been proposed. In the proposed coastline extraction method, sea and land textures are segmented by using cooccurrence and histogram features of the wavelet image representation. The coastlines are identified as the boundaries of the sea regions. For the coastline matching, shape descriptors are investigated and a shape matching method using dynamic programming is adapted. Proposed automatic coastline extraction and coastline matching methods are tested using a vector map of the Aegean coast of Turkey.