A Systematic Extraction and Outburst Susceptibility Assessment of Glacial lakes in High Mountain Regions using Landsat 8 Imagery

Abstract

Extracting glacial lake regions from satellite images is critical for determining the risk of glacial lake outbursts. Most previously reported techniques rely heavily on field surveys, which are time-consuming, expensive, and labor-intensive. As a result, an automatic and dependable system is required to extract glacial lake areas from satellite imagery accurately. Landsat8 satellite images with low contrast and heterogeneous backgrounds present significant challenges for extracting information in the glacial lake area. To address these issues, a quick shift segmentation technique is proposed in this paper to extract the glacial lake area precisely. After the enhanced water features have been obtained using the modified normalized difference water index (MNDWI) technique, the proposed method is used to extract the glacial lake area. The area threshold is also used to assess the vulnerability of the glacial lake area to outbursts. The proposed method is tested using data collected from the Landsat 8 satellite over three years in high mountain regions. According to qualitative and quantitative performance analysis, the proposed method outperforms previously reported state-of-the-art methods for determining glacial lake area.