Abstract: Sea-land segmentation is a key issue for marine target detection and coastline extraction．Based on the traditional sea-land segmentation method which processes the image by pixels,this paper presented a method which processes the maritime boundary region efficiently by blocks．This method first investigates four edges of the image and extracts texture features based on edge information named Edge Based Texture (EBT) feature．Then maritime boundary seed block can be captured by EBT feature．From this seed block,maritime boundary is traversed and detected efficiently by EBT feature．Experimental results show that the proposed method is of high accuracy．Compared with the state-of-the-art methods,the computational burden is greatly reduced.

Key words: Sea-land segmentation,EBT,Boundary tracking