Glaciers' changes are an important indicator of global warming, and the interpretation of satellite images offers a good source of information for such a monitoring. It is important to select areas of interest for the detection of glaciers bodies and in particular to capture also the part covered with debris, which is an open issue in remote sensing of the glaciers. We use enhancing features with a physical meaning and we provide a coarse segmentation of the image of the Lys glacier belonging to the Monte Rosa district in the Alps. The image data correspond to electromagnetic sensing of sunlight as reflected in band of the visible red spectral range, T M3, and in two infrared bands T M4 and T M5, as operated from the thematic mapper (TM) sensor aboard the Landsat satellite in clear sunny days. (C) 2016 International Association for Mathematics and Computers in Simulation (IMACS). Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.