Analysis of Waves and Human Interaction Using Beach Webcams

Automatic monitoring of beach video streams is important for improving safety, environmental monitoring, research, and education related to beach activities. This paper introduces a novel approach for monitoring water bodies by analyzing beach video streams. In contrast to earlier works, in the proposed approach we analyze not only the behavior of water bodies, or of humans on beach videos, but also the interactions between them. By integrating human activity and water behavior analysis, the approach provides new insights that are unattainable by analyzing each separately. To accomplish this objective, deep neural networks are utilized to analyze video streams from existing beach webcams. The analysis includes the detection and tracking of people and waves, as well as higher level analysis. We use the task of characterizing surfing conditions as a case study and demonstrate our ability to estimate the values of key parameters that can help determine the quality of a surf spot at a given time.