Mapping shoreline change using machine learning: a case study from the eastern Indian coast

Abstract

The continuous shift of shoreline boundaries due to natural or anthropogenic events has created the necessity to monitor the shoreline boundaries regularly. This study investigates the perspective of implementing artificial intelligence techniques to model and predict the realignment in shoreline along the eastern Indian coast of Orissa (now called Odisha). The modeling consists of analyzing the satellite images and corresponding reanalysis data of the coastline. The satellite images (Landsat imagery) of the Orissa coastline were analyzed using edge detection filters, mainly Sobel and Canny. Sobel and canny filters use edge detection techniques to extract essential information from satellite images. Edge detection reduces the volume of data and filters out worthless information while securing significant structural features of satellite images. The image differencing technique is used to determine the shoreline shift from GIS images (Landsat imagery). The shoreline shift dataset obtained from the GIS image is used together with the metrological dataset extracted from Modern-Era Retrospective analysis for Research and Applications, Version 2, and tide and wave parameter obtained from the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecast for the period 1985–2015, as input parameter in machine learning (ML) algorithms to predict the shoreline shift. Artificial neural network (ANN), k-nearest neighbors (KNN), and support vector machine (SVM) algorithm are used as a ML model in the present study. The ML model contains weights that are multiplied with relevant inputs/features to obtain a better prediction. The analysis shows wind speed and wave height are the most prominent features in shoreline shift prediction. The model’s performance was compared, and the observed result suggests that the ANN model outperforms the KNN and SVM model with an accuracy of 86.2%.