A Rapid Extraction of Water Body Features from Antarctic Coastal Oasis Using Very High-Resolution Satellite Remote Sensing Data

Abstract

Antarctic coastal oases are essential sources of spatially distributed fresh water bodies. Mapping water bodies from remote places, such as polar regions, using traditional surveying method is a laborious and logistically expensive task. A rapid method for extracting and monitoring water bodies in Antarctic coastal oases has a tremendous application in remote sensing. This study discusses the design of a rapid and novel method to extract water body features in Antarctic coastal oasis environment from remotely-sensed images. We devised semiautomatic approach for extracting water body features based on a novel set of normalized difference water index (NDWI) by incorporating high-resolution WorldView-2 (WV-2) panchromatic and multispectral image data. This study highlights and compares the viability of state-of-the-art spectral processing water body extraction approaches with the newly designed NDWI approach. An extensive quantitative evaluation was carried out to test the newly designed NDWI approach for extracting water bodies on Larsemann Hills, eastern Antarctica. The results suggest that the modified NDWI approach render intermediate performance with bias error varying from ∼1 to ∼34 m2 (least amount of misclassified pixels). We also analyzed the distinctive 8-band capability of WV-2 data coupled with semiautomatic extraction methods to compare their reliability in extracting the water body area. The results indicate that the use of the modified NDWI approach on 8-band WV-2 data can significantly improve the semiautomatic extraction of water body features, which can ultimately contribute to an enhanced perceptive of the Antarctic coastal oasis in the context of climate change.