Recursive active contours for hierarchical segmentation of wetlands in high-resolution satellite imagery of Arctic landscapes

We present a semi-automated approach to recognize and hierarchically partition water-body regions of Arctic tundra landscape, such as streams, inundated drained thaw lake basins and ice wedge polygon ponds, in high resolution satellite imagery. The approach integrates the active contours without edges (ACWE) technique and shape-based recognition, and introduces a recursive mode of ACWE application. We build a successive coarse-to-fine hierarchy of image partitions corresponding to the low-gradient Arctic wetlands by recursively partitioning them at the coarser scale into constituent parts. The approach is evaluated using 0.6 m resolution WorldView-2 satellite image of Arctic tundra landscape. The water-body regions segmentation producer´s accuracy is 97.7 %, and the user´s accuracy is 92.9 %. Visual inspection of the classification and hierarchical partitioning of the segmented water-body regions has demonstrated their qualitatively accurate recognition and hierarchical partitioning.