A coastline detection method using synthetic aperture radar （SAR）images based on local statistical active contour model has been proposed in this paper. The method incorporates the local statistical active contour model to detect the coastline in SAR images. In order to remove the limitation of a rigid initial contour being requested in the local statistical active contour model

this method firstly utilizes a C-V model to gain an approximate segmentation. Thereafter

a local statistical active contour model based on G0 distribution is proposed to achieve the accurate segmentation results. The new model adopted G0 distribution to fit each neighborhood along the contour

enhancing the fitting ability for SAR images and improving the detection accuracy of the coastline. Through combining a penalizing term of level set function

the model eliminates the need of re-initialization procedure. The experiments of real SAR images demonstrate the proposed method has accurate coastline detection ability.