An Integrated Active Contour Approach to Shoreline Mapping Using HSI and DEM

This paper introduces a new approach to shoreline mapping, which provides critical input to nautical charting, coastal zone management, and legal boundary determination. We extract shorelines by fusing AVIRIS hyperspectral imagery (HSI) with a LiDAR-generated DEM using a multiphase active contour segmentation technique. Our approach employs a study of object spectra and a knowledge-based segmentation scheme for generating an initial solution followed by a contour evolution technique to achieve a subpixel level of accuracy, while maintaining low computational complexity. Introducing the DEM into shoreline delineation from HSI proves to be a useful tool in eliminating misclassifications and in increasing localization accuracy. Experimental results show that our integrated approach to mapping shorelines has promising outcomes that provide a way to exploit the rich information found in HSI.