Shoreline Extraction and Change Detection using 1:5000 Scale Orthophoto Maps: A Case Study of Latvia-Riga

Coastal management requires rapid, up-to-date, and correct information. Thus, the determination of coastal movements and its directions has primary importance for coastal managers. For monitoring the change of shorelines, remote sensing data, very high resolution aerial images and orthophoto maps are utilized for detections of change on shorelines. It is possible to monitor coastal changes by extracting the coastline from orthophoto maps. Along the Baltic Sea and Riga Gulf, Latvian coastline length is 496 km. It is rich of coastal resources and natural biodiversity. Around 120 km of coastline are affected by significant coastal changes caused by climate change, storms, erosion, human activities and other reasons and they must be monitored. In this study, an object-oriented approach has been proposed to detect shoreline and detect the changes by using 1:5000 scaled orthophoto maps of Riga-Latvia (3bands, R, G, and NIR) in the years of 2007 and 2013. As many of the authors have mentioned, object-oriented classification method can be more successful than the pixel-based methods especially for high resolution images to avoid mix-classification. In the presented study the eCognition object-oriented fuzzy image processing software has been used. The results were compared to the results derived from manual digitizing. Extracted and manually digitized shorelines have been divided in 5 m segments in x axis. The y coordinates of the new nodes were taken from the original “.dxf” file or computed by interpolation. Thus, the RMS errors of selected points were calculated.