SOM based segmentation method for water region detection in satellite images

There is increasing desire and need in research of water region detection owing to the unexpected natural disaster that lead to financial, environment and human losses. Surveying of water region and research on its feature is very basic step for many planning, especially for countries like Japan, where tsunami has caused the changes on water region in March, 2011. Essentially, identifying water region from satellite images is one of the grand steps of water resources management for a country. Professional and academic institutions play a vital role in the management of water resources as they are instrumental in research. The objective of this paper is to identify the water region from satellite image. In this paper, the segmentation algorithm based on SOM (self-organizing map) neural network with compression pre-processing by wavelet transform and image smoothing using Gaussian low-pass frequency domain filters are presented.