Automated Identification of Rivers and shorelines in Aerial Imagery Using Image Texture

A method has been developed which automatically extracts river and river bank locations from arbitrarily sourced high resolution ("lm) visual spectrum imagery without recourse to multi-spectral or even color information. This method relies on quantifying the difference in image texture between the relatively smooth surface of the river water and the rougher surface of the vegetated land or built environment bordering it and then segmenting the image into high and low roughness regions. The edges of the low roughness regions then define the river banks. The method can be coded in any language without recourse to proprietary tools and requires minimal operator intervention. As this sort of imagery is increasingly being made freely available through such services as Google Earth or Worldwind this technique can be used to extract river features when more specialized imagery or software is not available.