SAET (Shoreline Analysis and Extraction Tool) is a novel open-source tool developed by CGAT researchers to enable the completely automatic characterisation of the shoreline position using the imagery acquired by the Sentinel-2 and Landsat 8 and 9 satellites. SAET has been developed within the ECFAS (European Coastal Flood Awareness System) project (https://www.ecfas.eu/) focusing on the monitoring of the shoreline position changes associated with punctual events such as coastal storms.
For a given beach segment, SAET facilitates the selection of the satellite images closest in time to the analysed events that offer an adequate cloud coverage level for analysing the shoreline change. Subsequently, the tool automatically downloads the images from their official repositories, pre-processes them and extracts the shoreline position with sub-pixel accuracy in vector formats (points and lines). The tool offers different settings to be adapted to the different coastal environments and beach typologies. Its main advantages refer to its autonomy, its efficiency in extracting complete satellite scenes, its flexibility in adapting to different environments and conditions, and its high subpixel accuracy. SAET provides an efficient and completely automatic workflow that leads to accurate SDSs while only relying on publicly available information. The tool appears to be a useful extraction tool for beach monitoring, both for public administrations and individual users.
The software is freely available at GitHub and Zenodo
The paper presenting the tool is available with the following reference:
Palomar-Vázquez, J., Pardo-Pascual, J. E., Almonacid-Caballer, J., & Cabezas-Rabadán, C. (2023). Shoreline Analysis and Extraction Tool (SAET): A New Tool for the Automatic Extraction of Satellite-Derived Shorelines with Subpixel Accuracy. Remote Sensing, 15(12), 3198. DOI: 10.3390/rs15123198