Proceedings Article | 25 October 2012
Fábio Santos, Joaquim Pais-Barbosa, Ana Teodoro, Hernâni Gonçalves, Paolo Baptista, António Moreira, Fernando Veloso-Gomes, Francisco Taveira-Pinto, Paulo Gomes-Costa, Vítor Lopes, Filipe Neves-Santos
KEYWORDS: Video, Cameras, RGB color model, Image processing, Algorithm development, Remote sensing, Imaging systems, Detection and tracking algorithms, Coastal modeling, Environmental sensing
The Portuguese coastline, like many other worldwide coastlines, is often submitted to several types of extreme events resulting in erosion, thus, acquisition of high quality field measurements has become a common concern. The nearshore survey systems have been traditionally based on in situ measurements or in the use of satellite or aircraft mounted remote sensing systems. As an alternative, video-monitoring systems proved to be an economic and efficient way to collect useful and continuous data, and to document extreme events. In this context, is under development the project MoZCo (Advanced Methodologies and Techniques Development for Coastal Zone Monitoring), which intends to develop and implement monitoring techniques for the coastal zone based on a low cost video monitoring system. The pilot study area is Ofir beach (north of Portugal), a critical coastal area. In the beginning of this project (2010) a monitoring video station was developed, collecting snapshots and 10 minutes videos every hour. In order to process the data, several video image processing algorithms were implemented in Matlab®, allowing achieve the main video-monitoring system products, such as, the shoreline detection. An algorithm based on image processing techniques was developed, using the HSV color space, the idea is to select a study and a sample area, containing pixels associated with dry and wet regions, over which a thresholding and some morphological operators are applied. After comparing the results with manual digitalization, promising results were achieved despite the method’s simplicity, which is in continuous development in order to optimize the results.
