A fully automated method for monitoring the intertidal topography using Video Monitoring Systems

Abstract Coastal systems are extremely dynamic environments exposed to many hazards, making accurate and regular monitoring a major challenge, particularly in the context of global change and sea level rise. In this frame of reference, high-frequency, high-resolution coastal Video Monitoring Systems (VMS) have been installed on three megatidal (tidal amplitude > 9 m) sites of Normandy (France) including a sandy beach at Villers-sur-Mer, a pebble beach at Etretat and a composite beach at Hautot-sur-Mer. This article proposes the use of Mask R-CNN to process images acquired at these sites and perform the automatic segmentation of the visible bodies of water in order to extract the waterline. The extracted waterlines are associated with a measured water level, which makes it possible to reconstruct the topography of the beaches at the scale of the tidal cycle. After training the neural network on manually labeled data, the segmentation by Mask R-CNN is very efficient by achieving a satisfactory segmentation on 69.87% of the images of Villers-sur-Mer, on 67.11% at Hautot-sur-Mer, and on 97.33% at Etretat. Once the waterlines have been extracted and georeferenced, the reproduction of the beaches’ morphology is satisfactory (averaged vertical RMSE = 28 cm). These results confirm that segmentation by Mask R-CNN is a particularly powerful tool that allows efficient and low-cost monitoring of the evolution of beach morphology, particularly in response to marine conditions. Its capabilities to detect and segment bodies of water while not being affected by the various sources of noise make it a remarkably effective tool for coastal science applications.