A new video monitoring system in support of Coastal Zone Management at Apulia Region, Italy

New systems for video monitoring and surveillance of Apulian coasts (South-east of Italy) have been recently employed. The system design aims at obtaining a tool able to automatically perform image acquisition, image processing and dissemination of results on a web portal. In the present paper, the system implementation and video stations installation at two different sites are described. A new specific Shoreline Detection Model (SDM) has been developed, based on boundary extraction procedure from automatic segmented coastal area. In real time, processed images and shoreline maps are uploaded and make freely downloadable. Moreover, shoreline time variation analysis is available on user-selected transects in cross-shore direction. The SDM model validation is here presented at one location. Over a set of testing images, the pixel-based comparison between manually and automatically detected shorelines lead to a mean distance of about 1.17 pixel. Then, the reconstruction of intertidal bathymetry from video is reported and compared with topographical (d-RTK) field survey, in order to assess the system efficacy and accuracy in coastal area monitoring, resulting in a mean RMS error overall the transects investigated equal to 0.025 m. (C) 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.