Photogrammetry and image processing techniques for beach monitoring
(2020-11-27) Sánchez-García, Elena; Balaguer Beser, Ángel Antonio; Pardo-Pascual, Josep Eliseu; Dpto. de Matemática Aplicada; Dpto. de Ingeniería Cartográfica Geodesia y Fotogrametría; Escuela Técnica Superior de Ingeniería Geodésica, Cartográfica y Topográfica; Grupo de Cartografía Geoambiental y Teledetección; Ministerio de Educación, Cultura y Deporte; Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad
[EN] The land-water boundary varies according to the sea level and the shape of a beach profile that is continuously modelled by incident waves. Attempting to model the response of a landscape as geomorphologically volatile as beaches requires multiple precise measurements to recognize responses to the actions of various geomorphic agents. It is therefore essential to have monitoring systems capable of systematically recording the shoreline accurately and effectively. New methods and tools are required to efficiently capture, characterize, and analyze information – and so obtain geomorphologically significant indicators. This is the aim of the doctoral thesis, focusing on the development of tools and procedures for coastal monitoring using satellite images and terrestrial photographs. The work brings satellite image processing and photogrammetric solutions to scientists, engineers, and coastal managers by providing results that demonstrate the usefulness of these viable and lowcost techniques. Existing and freely accessible public information (satellite images, video-derived data, or crowdsourced photographs) can be converted into high quality data for monitoring morphological changes on beaches and thus help achieve a sustainable management of coastal resources.
A New Adaptive Image Interpolation Method to Define the Shoreline at Sub-Pixel Level
(MDPI AG, 2019-08-12) Sánchez-García, Elena; Balaguer Beser, Ángel Antonio; Almonacid Caballer, Jaime; Pardo Pascual, Josep Eliseu; Dpto. de Matemática Aplicada; Dpto. de Ingeniería Cartográfica Geodesia y Fotogrametría; Escuela Técnica Superior de Ingeniería Geodésica, Cartográfica y Topográfica; Grupo de Cartografía Geoambiental y Teledetección; Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad
[EN] This paper presents a new methodological process for detecting the instantaneous land-water border at sub-pixel level from mid-resolution satellite images (30 m/pixel) that are freely available worldwide. The new method is based on using an iterative procedure to compute Laplacian roots of a polynomial surface that represents the radiometric response of a set of pixels. The method uses a first approximation of the shoreline at pixel level (initial pixels) and selects a set of neighbouring pixels to be part of the analysis window. This adaptive window collects those stencils in which the maximum radiometric variations are found by using the information given by divided differences. Therefore, the land-water surface is computed by a piecewise interpolating polynomial that models the strong radiometric changes between both interfaces. The assessment is tested on two coastal areas to analyse how their inherent differences may affect the method. A total of 17 Landsat 7 and 8 images (L7 and L8) were used to extract the shorelines and compare them against other highly accurate lines that act as references. Accurate quantitative coastal data from the satellite images is obtained with a mean horizontal error of 4.38 +/- 5.66 m and 1.79 +/- 2.78 m, respectively, for L7 and L8. Prior methodologies to reach the sub-pixel shoreline are analysed and the results verify the solvency of the one proposed.
Evaluation of annual mean shoreline position deduced from Landsat imagery as a mid-term coastal evolution indicator
(Elsevier, 2016-02-01) Almonacid Caballer, Jaime; Sánchez García, Elena; Pardo Pascual, Josep Eliseu; Balaguer Beser, Ángel Antonio; Palomar Vázquez, Jesús Manuel; Dpto. de Matemática Aplicada; Dpto. de Ingeniería Cartográfica Geodesia y Fotogrametría; Escuela Técnica Superior de Ingeniería Geodésica, Cartográfica y Topográfica; Grupo de Cartografía Geoambiental y Teledetección; Ministerio de Educación, Cultura y Deporte
[EN] The shoreline is a useful indicator of mid-term coastal evolution. Every shoreline is affected by instantaneous sealevel, the length of the run-up, and beach profile changes. In this work, annual mean shorelines are evaluated in a manner that avoids these effects by averaging the instantaneous shoreline positions registered during the same year. A set of 270 shorelines obtained from Landsat imagery between 2000 and 2014, using the method described in Pardo-Pascual et al. (2012), have been used. It has been shown that the use of annual mean shorelines enables the same rate of change to be obtained as when using all the shorelines, but that the data is simpler to manage and more useful when visualising local changes. It has also been shown that annual mean shorelines largely remove the short-term variability, and are therefore useful for analysing mid-term trend quantifications. In addition, we propose a methodology for annual mean shorelines, obtained from Landsat imagery, that minimises the effects of sea-level variation on the shoreline positions. Both shorelines – instantaneous and mean annual – appear to be about 4 or 5 m seaward from those obtained using more precise sources.
Assessing the accuracy of automatically extracted shorelines on microtidal beaches from Landsat 7, Landsat 8 and Sentinel-2 imagery
(MDPI AG, 2018) Pardo Pascual, Josep Eliseu; Sánchez García, Elena; Almonacid Caballer, Jaime; Palomar Vázquez, Jesús Manuel; Priego de los Santos, Jose Enrique; Fernández Sarriá, Alfonso; Balaguer Beser, Ángel Antonio; Dpto. de Matemática Aplicada; Dpto. de Ingeniería Cartográfica Geodesia y Fotogrametría; Escuela Técnica Superior de Ingeniería Geodésica, Cartográfica y Topográfica; Instituto Universitario de Restauración del Patrimonio; Grupo de Cartografía Geoambiental y Teledetección; Ministerio de Educación; Ministerio de Economía, Industria y Competitividad
[EN] This paper evaluates the accuracy of shoreline positions obtained from the infrared (IR) bands of Landsat 7, Landsat 8, and Sentinel-2 imagery on natural beaches. A workflow for sub-pixel shoreline extraction, already tested on seawalls, is used. The present work analyzes the behavior of that workflow and resultant shorelines on a micro-tidal (<20 cm) sandy beach and makes a comparison with other more accurate sets of shorelines. These other sets were obtained using differential GNSS surveys and terrestrial photogrammetry techniques through the C-Pro monitoring system. 21 sub-pixel shorelines and their respective high-precision lines served for the evaluation. The results prove that NIR bands can easily confuse the shoreline with whitewater, whereas SWIR bands are more reliable in this respect. Moreover, it verifies that shorelines obtained from bands 11 and 12 of Sentinel-2 are very similar to those obtained with bands 6 and 7 of Landsat 8 (-0.75 +/- 2.5 m; negative sign indicates landward bias). The variability of the brightness in the terrestrial zone influences shoreline detection: brighter zones cause a small landward bias. A relation between the swell and shoreline accuracy is found, mainly identified in images obtained from Landsat 8 and Sentinel-2. On natural beaches, the mean shoreline error varies with the type of image used. After analyzing the whole set of shorelines detected from Landsat 7, we conclude that the mean horizontal error is 4.63 m (+/- 6.55 m) and 5.50 m (+/- 4.86 m), respectively, for high and low gain images. For the Landsat 8 and Sentinel-2 shorelines, the mean error reaches 3.06 m (+/- 5.79 m).
C-Pro: A coastal projector monitoring system using terrestrial photogrammetry with a geometric horizon constraint
(Elsevier, 2017) Sánchez García, Elena; Balaguer Beser, Ángel Antonio; Pardo Pascual, Josep Eliseu; Dpto. de Matemática Aplicada; Dpto. de Ingeniería Cartográfica Geodesia y Fotogrametría; Escuela Técnica Superior de Ingeniería Geodésica, Cartográfica y Topográfica; Grupo de Cartografía Geoambiental y Teledetección; Generalitat Valenciana; Ministerio de Educación; Ministerio de Economía, Industria y Competitividad
[EN] This paper describes a methodological protocol to project a terrestrial photograph of a coastal area or whatever indicator is contained on it in a georeferenced plane taking advantage of the terrestrial horizon as a geometric key. This feature, which appears in many beach photos, helps in camera repositioning and as a constraint in collinearity adjustment. This procedure is implemented in a tool called Coastal Projector (C-Pro) that is based on Matlab and adapts its methodology in accordance with the input data and the available parameters of the acquisition system. The method is tested in three coastal areas to assess the influence that the horizon constraint presents in the results. The proposed methodology increases the reliability and efficient use of existing recreational cameras (with non-optimal requirements, unknown image calibration, and at elevations lower than 7 m) to provide quantitative coastal data.
Analysis of the shoreline position extracted from Landsat TM and ETM+ imagery
(Copernicus Publications, 2015) Sánchez García, Elena; Pardo Pascual, Josep Eliseu; Balaguer Beser, Ángel Antonio; Almonacid Caballer, Jaime; Dpto. de Matemática Aplicada; Dpto. de Ingeniería Cartográfica Geodesia y Fotogrametría; Escuela Técnica Superior de Ingeniería Geodésica, Cartográfica y Topográfica; Grupo de Cartografía Geoambiental y Teledetección; Ministerio de Educación, Cultura y Deporte
[EN] A statistical analysis of the results obtained by the tool SELI (Shoreline Extraction from Landsat Imagery) is made in order to characterise the medium and long term period changes occurring on beaches. The analysis is based on the hypothesis that intra-annual shifts of coastline positions hover around an average position, which would be significant when trying to set these medium and long term trends. Fluctuations around this average are understood as the effect of short-term changes -variations related to sea level, wave run-up, and the immediate morphological beach profile settings of the incident waves- whilst the alterations of the average position will obey changes relating to the global sedimentary harmony of the analysed beach segment. The goal of this study is to assess the validity of extracted Landsat shorelines knowing whether the intrinsic error could alter the position of the computed mean annual shoreline or if it is balanced out between the successive averaged images. Two periods are stablished for the temporal analysis in the area according to the availability of other data taken from high precision sources. Statistical tests performed to compare samples (Landsat versus high accuracy) indicate that the two sources of data provide similar information regarding annual means; coastal behaviour and dynamics, thereby verifying Landsat shorelines as useful data for evolutionary studies.