Remote coastal monitoring of beach usage on Tairua Beach
- Author
- May-Stanley BP
- Year
- 2021
- Journal / Source
- MSc
- Publisher / Organisation
- University of Waikato
- Pages
- 60 pp
- Summary
- Research that gathers data from public reporting is susceptible to population bias, which arises from lack of knowledge on the probability of a person’s ability to witness an event. Data collection based on public reporting is often used in coastal research relating to litter, stranded marine animals or bird spotting. It is biased by the probability of a person being in the vicinity, noticing and informing the appropriate organizations about the event. There is potential to improve population biased data by correcting for the probability of a person being present in a particular coastal vicinity. This thesis aims to better understand spatial and temporal beach usage at Tairua Beach in New Zealand. Building on existing literature, this research incorporates modern techniques to detect people on beaches from images taken every hour, during daylight, over a six-year period (2008 to 2013) from Tairua Beach, New Zealand. These methods include histogram matching, signal detection, machine learning-based classification, image registration and rectification, and various data cleaning techniques.