Detecting Coastal and Shoreline Change in North Branch of Yangtze River Based on Remote Sensing

Based on three remotely sensed imageries (Landsat TM) acquired in 1992, 1995 and 2008, respectively, the coastal information and shoreline in North Branch of Yangtze River have been extracted. After a standard data processing, the method of density segmentation was used to retrieve the land and water separation binary image, hence to obtain the information about the change of water area and shoreline changes from 1992 to 2008. In addition, the reason of the change and the impact factors of shoreline change have been explored based on the observed results from remote sensing images. It is demonstrated that the land reclamation strongly influenced the coastal change and shoreline evolution, weakened the runoff and changed the inflow line at the same time.