A Novel Coarse-to-Fine Sea-Land Segmentation Technique Based on Superpixel Fuzzy C-Means Clustering and Modified Chan-Vese Model

Abstract

The sea-land segmentation for optical remote sensing images (RSIs) has a valuable role in water resources and coastal zones management. However, it is challenging because optical RSIs mainly suffer from low contrast, intensity inhomogeneity with mixed pixels, and large image size with redundant information. This paper introduces a novel coarse-to-fine sea-land segmentation method that incorporates Superpixel Fuzzy C-Means (SPFCM) and a Modified Chan-Vese active contour model (MCV). First, the image is over-segmented into superpixels to reduce the information redundancy and utilize spectral and spatial information. The SPFCM employs local relationships among neighboring superpixels to cluster the superpixels based on their color and texture features, deal with mixed pixels, and produce coarse segmentation results. The CV depends on the initial contour. If the contour is incorrectly initialized, the CV may trap in local minima and needs many iterations. The purpose of the SPFCM result is to provide an automatic initial contour for an MCV model instead of manual initialization to improve the CV model's performance. Finally, color and texture features are combined in vector-valued images to solve the traditional CV's problems to deal with complicated nature images with intensity inhomogeneity or rich texture features to produce fine segmentation results. The proposed method is evaluated and achieved an average accuracy of 98.9%, an average Jaccard Similarity Coefficient (JSC) equals 97.1%, an average Disc Similarity Coefficient (DSC) equals 98.5%, and an average recall equals 99.3%. The proposed method results are promising, and it outperformed the results of other state-of-the-art sea-land segmentation methods.