Segmentation of desert sand dunes

Abstract

Dune fields occupy considerable land areas not only on earth but also on other planetary surfaces like Venus, Mars and Saturn’s moon Titan. Their characteristic orientations pose a challenge for studying them using remote sensing imagery. In this letter, a novel methodology to segment sand dunes as observed on satellite imagery is proposed. The Radon spectrum for an image is obtained by using various projections sampled at finer angular directions. Statistical features such as mode, median, mean, standard deviation and entropy have been defined to characterize the textural information captured by Radon spectrum. Landsat and LISS-III data were used to test the utility of the methodology developed. Comparisons with traditional segmentation approaches have demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed methodology. It is seen that mode, entropy and standard deviation features of Radon spectrum are more suitable for segmenting dune regions.