A lineament is one of the most important features showing subsurface elements or structural weakness such as faults and is usually extracted by visual analysis of enhanced image data. A different expert may extract different segments through a visual approach. To detect lineaments under the same conditions, this paper proposes a data processing approach on the automatically extraction of edge from Landsat Thematic Mapper (TM) data. The method can delete the unnecessary edge and decide the threshold for the binary processing considering the features of the histogram of the data. Relief energy maps help visually understand the circumstances for incursions of rivers. The relief energy has been computed, and then the correspondence between the computation and extracted edges is described.
As a result of experience, it is evident that edges from each band TM data exist in the region where the relief energy changes and its saddle. It becomes also clear that the edges obtained from each band TM data with the proposed method are in agreement with lineaments by experts through the relief energy map.