Shoreline erosion of microtidal beaches examined with UAV and remote sensing techniques

Abstract

Coastal geomorphology requires increasingly accurate topographic information of the beach systems to perform reliable simulation of coastal erosion and flooding phenomena, in order to obtain reliable vulnerability assessment. Among the range of remote sensing methods available to produce measurement of the coastline, this study tests the utility of low-altitude aerial imagery by Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) on the beaches of Serapo and S. Agostino, located in the Latinum region, in the Thyrrenian Sea, and spaceborne Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) measurements which are processed with the purpose of exploiting the dual-polarimetric information to better distinguish land from sea.The dataset consists of two sets of images, both acquired by UAV and SAR platforms, the first in December 2013 and the second in June 2018. A comparison of the coastline extraction obtained with the same technique in two different temporal sequences and between different techniques in the same period has been performed in order to assess benefits and limitations of each methodology.