Real-Scale Island Area and Coastline Estimation using Only its Place Name or Coordinates
Authors: Quanyun Wu, Kyle Gao, Wentao Sun, Hongjie He, Yuhao Chen, David A. Clausi, Jonathan Li
Organizations: University of Waterloo, Waterloo, ON, Canada · East China Normal University, Shanghai, China
Abstract
Accurate measurement of island area and coastline length is crucial for coastal zone monitoring and oceanographic analysis. However, traditional measurement and mapping methods usually rely heavily on orthophotos, expensive airborne depth sensors, or dense ground control points, which face serious limitations of high labor costs, time-consuming efforts, and low operational efficiency in vast and inaccessible open sea environments. To overcome these challenges and break away from the reliance on manual field exploration, this paper proposes a geometrically consistent, real-scale island measurement framework based on pure monocular vision. This project significantly reduces the mapping cost through a fully automated process and achieves high-efficiency measurement without prior GIS data. In our system pipeline, only the geographical coordinates or names of the target area need to be input to obtain a low-altitude surrounding image sequence. After obtaining the point clouds, a lightweight trajectory alignment algorithm (Umeyama) is used to restore the global physical scale, and the scaled model is orthorectified, enabling high-precision area and perimeter extraction directly on the 2D rasterized plane. We have fully verified this pipeline on four islands with different terrain features (covering natural landform islands and islands with complex artificial facilities). The experimental results show that the final measurement error of the system is stable at around 10%, demonstrating excellent accuracy and robustness. Moreover, this framework has outstanding inference speed, requiring only 70 ms to process a single high-resolution image and generate point clouds, providing a highly practical new paradigm for large-scale marine and coastline
Coastline detection in remotely sensed imagery is commonly formulated as pixel-wise segmentation, even though coastlines used in coastal monitoring are ultimately represented as geometric curves and defined by geomorphic proxies such as vegetation lines, dune toes, or cliff edges. We revisit coastline extraction from a representation perspective and formulate the task as geometric boundary localization, where a thin coastline boundary is localized directly as a curve rather than derived from a segmentation mask. Using the New Zealand Coastal Change Dataset (NZCCD) and LINZ aerial imagery, we develop CoastlineVLM-7B, a vision-language model built on the GeoChat-7B/LLaVA-1.5 architecture that jointly performs coastline presence detection, proxy-type classification, and direct coastline grounding as an ordered polyline. We compare it against U-Net, UNet++, DeepLabV3+, and SegFormer trained using one-pixel-wide coastline masks and evaluate localization using tolerance- and distance-based geometric metrics. On the West Coast test set, U-Net provides stronger local boundary proximity, showing better tolerance scores and lower Chamfer and Modified Average Hausdorff distances, while CoastlineVLM-7B achieves the lowest Hausdorff and Earth Mover's distances, indicating reduced worst-case deviation and stronger global structural correspondence. Ablation studies show that geometric localization is driven primarily by direct coastline-grounding supervision and that GeoChat initialization provides a stronger starting representation than generic LLaVA-1.5 initialization. Zero-shot evaluation on the Australian VCMP dataset shows reduced performance for U-Net and CoastlineVLM-7B, but CoastlineVLM-7B achieves better geometric localization than U-Net. These results show that direct ordered-polyline grounding can be used as an alternative formulation for representing and localizing coastline geometry.
Accurate volume and surface area estimation is critical for diverse applications, from marine ecology to medical diagnostics. However, existing methods often suffer from high computational costs and poor performance with sparse and noisy data. We propose a fully feed-forward framework that regresses scale-normalized volume and surface area and their associated uncertainties directly from multi-view images. By fusing 3D point cloud reconstructions with view-aligned 2D features through a graph-based decoder, our model bypasses iterative optimization, ensuring exceptional scalability and rapid inference. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods, particularly when operating with a low number of input images. Validated across coral monitoring, dietary analysis, and anthropometry, our proposed framework provides a robust, adaptable solution for quantitative shape analysis. This architecture provides a high-speed, scalable alternative for precise geometric estimation from visual data, maintaining high performance even in resource-constrained or sparse-view scenarios.
Accurate agricultural field boundary delineation at large scale is a foundational task for food security, supply chain transparency, and carbon accounting. While vision foundation models like SAM show remarkable zero-shot capabilities, they frequently fail in geospatial domains due to topological complexity, cropland texturing patterns, and a lack of physical scale awareness. In this work, we introduce Delineate Anything v2, a globally scalable foundation model designed specifically for wide-area field boundary mapping. We construct FBIS-73M, a 73-million-instance multi-resolution dataset spanning 61 countries. To address the pervasive issue of multi-field administrative parcel merging, we introduce a resolution-specific data curation pipeline that leverages topological image-space adaptation to homogenize merged parcels and strengthen weak physical boundaries. Furthermore, we establish a novel, manually curated evaluation benchmark covering 100 countries to assess independent zero-shot generalization. Our results show that Delineate Anything v2 surpasses the current state-of-the-art, including the Delineate Anything framework, by 0.284 mAP@0.5 (+103.3% relative gain), while maintaining execution speeds suitable for rapid national- and global-scale deployment, as demonstrated by nationwide mapping of Ukraine (603,000 km^2) in 5.4 hours on a consumer-grade workstation. Code, pre-trained weights, the FBIS-73M dataset, and ready-to-use national-scale vector boundary products are publicly available at https://lavreniuk.github.io/Delineate-Anything/.