A GIS-Based Tool for Extracting Shoreline Postions from Aerial Imagery (BeachTools)

Abstract

This Coastal and Hydraulics Engineering Technical Note (CHETN) presents BeachTools, an ArcView 3.x Geographic Information Systems (GIS) extension designed to identify and quantitatively establish the position of the shoreline and other coastal features from aerial imagery. Aerial imagery, i.e., digitized aerial photography, is commonly analyzed to qualitatively and quantitatively study the evolution of coastal inlet geomorphology. Methodologies for calculating sediment budgets and analyzing inlet-ebb shoal evolution based upon data derived from aerial photography can be found in CETN-IV-15 (Rosati and Kraus 1999) and CETN-IV-13 (Stauble 1998), respectively. BeachTools is designed to facilitate such studies by providing a suite of tools that allows for the automatic delineation of coastal features and the generation of baselines and transects, removing the tedium and subjectivity of extracting data by hand, and allowing for much greater precision of such measurements.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Sep 01, 2001
Accession Number
ADA588790

Entities

People

  • Gary A. Zarillo
  • Michelle Synder
  • Ron K. Hoeke

Organizations

  • Engineer Research and Development Center

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Air Platforms
  • Materials and Manufacturing Processes

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Aerial Photographs
  • Aerial Photography
  • Cameras
  • Coastal Engineering
  • Electronic Mail
  • Engineering
  • Engineers
  • Geographic Information Systems
  • Hydraulics
  • Images
  • Information Systems
  • Map Projection
  • Photographs
  • Photography

Fields of Study

  • Environmental science

Readers

  • Coastal and Marine Engineering/Sediment Transport/Hydraulic Engineering
  • Computer Vision.