Coastline Extraction Method Based on Convolutional Neural Networks—A Case Study of Jiaozhou Bay in Qingdao, China

The traditional edge detection-based shoreline extraction method is severely disturbed by noise, and it is difficult to obtain a continuous coastline. In response to the above problems, we propose a coastline extraction method based on convolutional neural networks. Firstly, we replace the standard convolution with the Mini-Inception structure in the backbone network to extract multi-scale features of the object, and all the multi-scale features are concatenated. Then, we use the leaky-ReLU activation function instead of the ReLU activation function to avoid the problem that “dead” neurons cannot learn the effective features of remote sensing images. Finally, the network fully exploits multi-level information of objects to perform the image-to-image prediction. We carried out experiments on the remote sensing images of Jiaozhou Bay in Qingdao. The experimental results showed that our method could effectively extract the coastline automatically, and the producer's accuracy and the user's accuracy were higher than the comparison methods.