Instance Segmentation for Governmental Inspection of Small Touristic Infrastructure in Beach Zones Using Multispectral High-Resolution WorldView-3 Imagery

Misappropriation of public lands is an ongoing government concern. In Brazil, the beach zone is public property, but many private establishments use it for economic purposes, requiring constant inspection. Among the undue targets, the individual mapping of straw beach umbrellas (SBUs) attached to the sand is a great challenge due to their small size, high presence, and agglutinated appearance. This study aims to automatically detect and count SBUs on public beaches using high-resolution images and instance segmentation, obtaining pixel-wise semantic information and individual object detection. This study is the first instance segmentation application on coastal areas and the first using WorldView-3 (WV-3) images. We used the Mask-RCNN with some modifications: (a) multispectral input for the WorldView3 imagery (eight channels), (b) improved the sliding window algorithm for large image classification, and (c) comparison of different image resizing ratios to improve small object detection since the SBUs are small objects (