Icelandic Coastline Extraction Based on Water Index Using Landsat-8 Image

The dynamic detection of coastline is important for the study of sea level rising caused by global climate change. Therefore, it is especially meaningful to select an appropriate method to extract the coastline accurately. In this paper, the coastal zones of Reykjavik, Iceland was chosen for the study area, and the method of combination water indices (i.e., NDWI, MNDWI, EWI, and AWEI) and the maximum interclass variance method (Otsu) was used to automatically detect the coastline. The results show that the NDWI and EWI can accurately extract the coastlines in this region, and NDWI performs better than others (accuracy of 91%). The conclusions obtained in this paper have the potential to be applied to coastline extraction in the polar regions.