An Adaptive Water Extraction Method from Remote Sensing Image Based on NDWI

Water is one of the most common and important objects on the earth, and its extraction is of great significance to many related researches in remote sensing domain. However, water always appears diversely, which makes its extraction not so simple. Many former methods are developed to extract water, which mainly based on a single model and only use spectral information, but the results are not so satisfying. An adaptive extraction method based on normalized difference water index (NDWI) is proposed here to extract water completely and accurately from remote sensing image. This study first compute NDWI to enhance water's spectral information, and then it is redefined so as to use the modified histogram auto-segmentation method to initially separate water from background; next, after segmentation, water pixels can be searched out and are taken as seed points to proceed region growing to get the local area of water; last, the edge of the local area is searched by a window template, and iterative classification within it is employed to precisely extract water's precise partition. Experiments are carried out here on an ETM+ image of a paralic area to extract water. Through comparison with other commonly used methods, it shows that the performance of the proposed method is superior to the others.