Automated Waterline Extraction for Optimal Land Use A Case Study in Crete

Coastal areas in Greece play an important role to the economic growth of the country. Especially in the islands as a major tourist destination, new tourist infrastructure is continuously being built. To optimize land use and protect current infrastructure, we need to properly define the waterline. In addition, the waterline is changing dynamically due to climate change and weather conditions, so it has to be monitored. The proposed framework is focused on the automatic extraction of waterline from aerial images using advanced image processing techniques. We plan to integrate the Greek cadastral data in the framework and along with spatial data analysis to be able to proceed with both coastal and cadastral data. Additional functionalities are provided to the planners, through metrics for distance and surface area calculations, in order to extract useful information for sustainable region planning of the coastal area. The results can be visualized in the images with the metrics of interest.