Characterization of river delta shorelines

Coastline shape is among the basic geometric properties of the Earth's surface, yet defining and quantifying coastline shape precisely remains challenging. Here we propose new methods, based on the dilation and erosion operators of mathematical morphology (MM), for the characterization of delta shorelines, a class of open coasts. We demonstrate the suitability of MM-based methods for noise removal and shoreline identification from digital images of river deltas of varying geometric complexity. We also show that a global, a regional and a local shoreline parameter provide a first step in distinguishing among river, wave, and tidal dominated delta shapes.