A Deep Learning Based Method to Delineate the Wet/Dry Shoreline and Compute Its Elevation Using High-Resolution UAS Imagery

Automatically detecting the wet/dry shoreline from remote sensing imagery has many benefits for beach management in coastal areas by enabling managers to take measures to protect wildlife during high water events. This paper proposes the use of a modified HED (Holistically-Nested Edge Detection) architecture to create a model for automatic feature identification of the wet/dry shoreline and to compute its elevation from the associated DSM (Digital Surface Model). The model is generalizable to several beaches in Texas and Florida. The data from the multiple beaches was collected using UAS (Uncrewed Aircraft Systems). UAS allow for the collection of high-resolution imagery and the creation of the DSMs that are essential for computing the elevations of the wet/dry shorelines. Another advantage of using UAS is the flexibility to choose locations and metocean conditions, allowing to collect a varied dataset necessary to calibrate a general model. To evaluate the performance and the generalization of the AI model, we trained the model on data from eight flights over four locations, tested it on the data from a ninth flight, and repeated it for all possible combinations. The AP and F1-Scores obtained show the success of the model’s prediction for the majority of cases, but the limitations of a pure computer vision assessment are discussed in the context of this coastal application. The method was also assessed more directly, where the average elevations of the labeled and AI predicted wet/dry shorelines were compared. The absolute differences between the two elevations were, on average, 2.1 cm, while the absolute difference of the elevations’ standard deviations for each wet/dry shoreline was 2.2 cm. The proposed method results in a generalizable model able to delineate the wet/dry shoreline in beach imagery for multiple flights at several locations in Texas and Florida and for a range of metocean conditions