A Vision-based Intelligent System for Coastal Erosion Monitoring

Global warming and climate change are inevitable global issues. It is predicted they will cause global sea level rise (SLR) in incoming years, which may impacting the development of coastal zones, especially in the low lying areas: coastal areas are home to more than one billion people across the globe. The first visible signal of natural hazards is the erosion of the shoreline: erosion is a natural phenomenon due to a fluid substance that flows on a solid one and makes its crumbling; the combination of unstoppable events - upraising sea level - together with critical human activities can speedup this phenomenon.In the last years new software-based approaches in the erosion monitoring have been proposed, mainly based on satellite images, while a few number of them is based on RGB cameras. But a solution that is at the same time cheap, easy to be installed and used, and that does not require human intervention at runtime is not yet been proposed.In this work we propose a system for coastal erosion monitoring based on RGB cameras. This system is very cheap and easy to be installed and maintained, and allows to continuously check the monitored area. The system has been installed and tested in a Marine Protected Area in the Salento region, in the South of Italy. Preliminary results are encouraging and highlight the feasibility of a monitoring system that can be installed everywhere, at reasonable costs.