Fuzzy ontology-based foreshore identification from digital terrain models and very high-resolution airborne imagery through GEOBIA multi-scale analysis

Coastal mapping provides information for coastal zone protection. Land foreshore-border mapping is important, since it is related to land and property management, raising the need for an automated foreshore delineation framework. This research develops a multi-scale GEographic Object-Based Image Analysis method for foreshore identification from single-date very high-resolution imagery and DTM. Foreshore interpretation criteria were provided by the Greek Cadastral Office; however, they defined the foreshore-borders in an ill-defined manner. Thus, an ontology was designed and implemented to formalize the implicit spectral, geometric, and spatial relationships described in the interpretation criteria, and employ them during identification. The final ontology was delivered after three design phases: specification, conceptualization, and knowledge formalization. Imagery preprocessing through anisotropic morphological levelings reduced undesired spatial detail and noise. A three-level segmentation and ontological classification approach was developed to compute proper objects and assign them into semantic categories. Class definitions were created through fuzzy restrictions, representing value ranges of the employed properties. Evaluation of the extracted foreshore area with human-interpreted reference data showed a 77.9% quality, which was satisfactory. Evaluation by comparing the extracted foreshore border to the reference data showed an average deviation of 2.4 m, which is within Greek Cadastral Office specifications.