Coastal video monitoring system: results and perspectives

Digital imagery is a powerful data source for coastal monitoring and research. The size and resolution of long-term imagery datasets provide detailed informations about the current state and evolutionary trends of the environment and contribute to studies involving model upgrading and data-model integration. The observations of the evolution of morphological parameters like shoreline location, intertidal bathymetry and bar crest elevation could be achieved. A semi-automatic procedure, from RGB images for shoreline extraction and beach slope computing is presented; a new approach for the automated clustering of sub-aqueous and sub-aerial pixels in YUV color space, applying an objective discriminator function to define the boundary has been developing. Applying probabilistic graphical networks approach to thermal infrared stream related to tide, meteorological parameters allow, at the time of installation, the classification of the upper intertidal beach and information on the potential sources of Aeolian sediment.