Scientists who study coastal ecosystems and hazards such as hurricanes, flooding, and cliff failure collect lots of photographs of coastal environments from airplanes and drones. A large area can be surveyed at high resolution and low cost. Additionally, satellites such as Landsat have provided imagery of the Nation’s coastlines every few days for decades. Scientist’s ability to understand coastal hazards would be greatly improved if this wealth of imagery could be ‘mined’ automatically by computers. We want to automate the process of identifying and labelling each region of the image from a set of categories (e.g. bare land, water, woody vegetation, herbaceous vegetation). We need to train a computer to recognize the same things that [...]
