The Effect of Spatial Scale of Shoreline Remote Sensing Information and Its Application

Spatial scale is one of the fundamental problems in geosciences. The spatial scale of remote sensing information and scaling have become the important study area of many scientific studies with the applications of remote sensing data. Usually, the scale of remote sensing image is determined by the sensor´s resolution, and the resolution affects the information contents of the remote sensing imagery. The purpose of the study is to find the quantitative relationship between remote sensing information and resolution, and then to develop a scaling model for remote sensing shoreline in order to get more accurate measurement. In this paper, the spatial scale of shoreline information extracted from satellite images with different resolutions has been studied based on fractal geometry. A spatial scaling model has been developed. The model has been used to scale the shorelines spatial scale extracted from IKONOS, IRS, SPOT and ETM+ images to 1:10000 and 1:50000 scales. The results have been compared with standard topographic map scales. It is shown that the model works well.