With coastal erosion and the increased interest in beach monitoring, there is a greater need for evaluation of the shoreline detection methods. Some studies have been conducted to produce state of the art reviews on shoreline definition and detection. It should be noted that with the development of remote sensing, shoreline detection is mainly achieved by image processing. Thus, it is important to evaluate the different image processing approaches used for shoreline detection. This paper presents a state of the art review on image processing methods used for shoreline detection in remote sensing. It starts with a review of different key concepts that can be used for shoreline detection. Then, the applied fundamental image processing methods are shown before a comparative analysis of these methods. A significant outcome of this study will provide practical insights into shoreline detection.

<p><strong>Abstract.</strong> Coastline detection is a very challenging task in optical remote sensing. However the majority of commonly used methods have been developed for low to medium resolution without specification of the key indicator that is used. In this paper, we propose a new approach for very high resolution images using a specific indicator. First, a pre-processing step is carried out to convert images into the optimal colour space (HSV). Then, wavelet decomposition is used to extract different colour and texture features. These colour and texture features are then used for Fusion of Over Segmentation (FOOS) based clustering to have the distinctive natural classes of the littoral. Among these classes are waves, dry sand, wet sand, sea and land. We choose the mean level of high tide water, the interface between dry sand and wet sand, as a coastline indicator. To find this limit, we use a Distance Regularization Level Set Evolution (DRLSE), which automatically evolves towards the desired sea-land border. The result obtained is then compared with a ground truth. Experimental results prove that the proposed method is an efficient coastline detection process in terms of quantitative and visual performances.</p>

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