Accurate Drainage Network Extraction from Satellite Imagery—A Survey

The extraction of the drainage hydrographical network is very important for various types of study such as hydrological analysis, geomorphology, environmental science, terrain analysis and still a research topic in the field of GIS. Drainage network is extracted through satellite image (e.g., digital elevation model) processing, contour map processing, and raster map processing. A raster map of an area contains many layers such as road network, building, forest area, waterbody, river pattern, text, and drainage pattern extracted from raster map is part of document image analysis. A toposheet or contour map contains the linear feature, namely elevation contour, waterbody, river network, text, and the extraction process of drainage line is time-consuming and traditional process. Due to the advances in satellite imagery, high-resolution digital elevation model (DEM) is captured by many satellites recently. The DEMs are advantageous over toposheet because it provides seamless provision of data with global coverage. Accurate drainage extraction from DEMs is used for morphometric analysis, hydrological analysis, terrain analysis, and many other areas in recent year across the world as DEM provides the fastest way to extract feature in various ways. This paper provides the evolution of satellite imagery and the accurate extraction of drainage network for various applications, namely geomorphometric analysis, hydrologic analysis, terrain analysis, and also describes the steps involved to extract drainage pattern from DEM, an up-to-date process.