Investigation on Spectral Indices and Soft Classifiers-Based Water Body Segmentation Approaches for Satellite Image Analysis

Abstract

The emerging threat for eco-sustainability has led to a breakthrough in satellite image analyses and such instantaneous monitoring of hazards could replenish the rejuvenation of natural ecosystem. Generally, the satellite images are huge dimensional data with numerous bands of specific details about the observed region. To apply immediate precautionary measures for environmental hazards and natural devastations, deploying a cloud-based intelligent web service for handling real time satellite image processing is inevitable. Therefore, the cloud implementation could afford integrated huge storage and parallel data processing tasks, the outcome of instantaneous satellite image processing relies with the effective data processing methods of less complexity. In this regard to address a major hazard of today which is drought monitoring, this paper focuses on developing an effective water segmentation method for such geospatial cloud web services. The Landsat 8 images of Sambhar lake region has been chosen for exploiting the water segmentation results. Most prevalent approaches from Spectral indices and unsupervised clustering such as normalized difference water index (NDWI), modified normalized difference water index, fuzzy C means, K-Means, Adaptive Regularized kernel fuzzy C means (ARKFCM) and simple linear iterative clustering-based superpixel segmentation (SLIC-SUPER) are compared, respectively. On comparative assessment using standard image quality assessment metrics, NDWI and ARKFCM outstands the rest with more accurate water body delineation. However, based on reduced computational complexity and instant localization, NDWI of spectral indexing approach clearly portray the significance of spectral influence in water body segmentation from satellite images. And it can be adapted as a persistent choice for instantaneous water body segmentation in a cloud-centered geospatial module.