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Histogram computed from the same region of interest shown in Fig. 2, showing the probability density function (PDF) of MNDWI values for each of the four labelled classes ('water', 'sand', 'whitewater' and 'other land features'). Otsu's threshold (Otsu, 1979) is computed as the threshold that maximises inter-class variance between the 'sand' and 'water' classes, ignoring the 'white-water' and 'other land features' classes which do not contribute to identify the shoreline (i. e., sand/water interface).

Histogram computed from the same region of interest shown in Fig. 2, showing the probability density function (PDF) of MNDWI values for each of the four labelled classes ('water', 'sand', 'whitewater' and 'other land features'). Otsu's threshold (Otsu, 1979) is computed as the threshold that maximises inter-class variance between the 'sand' and 'water' classes, ignoring the 'white-water' and 'other land features' classes which do not contribute to identify the shoreline (i. e., sand/water interface).

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CoastSat is an open-source software toolkit written in Python that enables the user to obtain time-series of shoreline position at any sandy coastline worldwide from 30+ years (and growing) of publicly available satellite imagery. The toolkit exploits the capabilities of Google Earth Engine to efficiently retrieve Landsat and Sentinel-2 images crop...

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... SWIR1 and G are the pixel intensity in the short-wave infrared band and green band, respectively. The MNDWI values range between À 1 and 1 as shown in Fig. 2c. Next, a histogram of MNDWI values is constructed with the labelled pixels located within a pre-defined distance (nominally set to 150 m in the toolkit) from 'sand' pixels as illustrated in Fig. 3. In the resulting histogram, the probability density function (PDF) of the 'sand' pixels is centred around positive values of MNDWI, while the 'water' pixels have negative MNDWI values. Accordingly, the 'sand'/'water' threshold is computed applying Otsu's thresholding algorithm (Otsu, 1979) to find the MNDWI value that maximises ...
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... 'other land features' class. The presence of 'white-water' is known to cause errors in the shoreline detection: Hagenaars et al. (2018) report seaward offsets of up to 40 m in the presence of wave-induced foam; and Pardo-Pascual et al. (2018) notes white-water as being one of the largest sources of error. Indeed, the histogram of MNDWI values in Fig. 3 reveals that the pixels belonging to the 'white-water' class span a broad range of values with no distinct peak and therefore do not assist in discriminating the shoreline and may in fact lead to false detections. The final step in the detection of individual shorelines is to compute the iso-valued contour on the MNDWI image for a ...

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