A new level set method has been proposed for coastline detection in high-resolution SAR images based on the generalized Gamma distribution (G Γ D). The G Γ D is a statistical model with high flexibility

which is able to characterize the diversity of scenes in SAR images effectively. The parameter estimation of the G Γ D is realized by the method of log-cumulants. Then the energy functional is formulated based on the G Γ D. The coastline detection is achieved by minimizing the proposed energy functional using the level set segmentation method. Experimental results with measured TerraSAR-X images have demonstrated that the proposed method can obtain more precise coastline detection results.