Extracting the ocean surface feature of non-linear internal solitary waves in MODIS satellite images

The objective of this study is to integrate an effective approach to extract the linear features of oceanic non-linear internal waves in MODIS images based on the technique of Multiscale Retinex and linear feature extraction. To evaluate the performance of the integrated method, the extracted linear features were vectorized and overlapped with the original image in the Geographic Information System to investigate the localization accuracy of the extracted features, which were rarely seen before. The results indicated that the MSR method provided an enhanced image with improved color contrast and brightness, which resulted in a better quality of the extracted linear features. Finally, we compared the performance of two methods of linear feature extraction, the Canny edge detector and the Wavelet Transform Modulus Maxima edge detector. It is shown that the Canny edge detector is superior to the WTMM edge detector in terms of visualization quality and localization accuracy.