Mallorca beach photos help AI track the shoreline

Mallorca’s changing coastline: new AI picks out the shoreline in phone photos taken at s’Arenal d’en Tem beach in Campos, Mallorca. The University of the Balearic Islands announced the research on Tuesday, 10 November. Its Institute for Artificial Intelligence Research developed the tool with the Balearic Islands Coastal Observing System (Socib).

A fixed spot for every photo

The photos come through CoastSnap, an international project with fixed phone supports that let people photograph a beach from the same point each time. Socib also has a station at s’Amarador beach in Santanyí, Mallorca. It plans ten more in the coming years: three on Mallorca, four on Ibiza and three on Menorca.

The phone photos show more spatial detail than satellite images. Changes in the shoreline’s position can help researchers spot erosion, recovery after storms and longer-term trends. Rising sea levels add to the need to check beaches more often, the university said.

Fewer errors than older methods

The team trained and compared four AI models using 1,717 photos from five Atlantic and Mediterranean beaches. The best, DeepLabV3, examines the whole image rather than relying only on colour changes. It can find the shoreline despite sun glare, shadows or wet sand.

Across the study’s comparisons, it made around 70% fewer errors than conventional automated methods. Its results were also close to those of specialists working by hand, with median differences of 2.6 metres at s’Arenal d’en Tem and 3.4 metres at s’Amarador.

The software is open source and can process a photo in about six seconds on an ordinary computer. That gives researchers a way to work through large numbers of beach photos as they follow changes to the coast.

Topics: Sea & coast · Santanyí · Llucmajor · Campos

Source: Europa Press / Mallorca.com