Seacliff erosion is a serious hazard with implications for coastal management, and is often estimated using successive hand digitized cliff tops or bases (toe) to assess cliff retreat. Even if efforts are made to standardize manual digitizing and eliminate subjectivity, the delineation of cliffs is time consuming, and depends on the analyst’s interpretation. We propose an automatic procedure to extract cliff edges from high resolution lidar-derived bare-earth digital elevation models, generalized coastal shoreline vectors and approximate measurements of distance between the shoreline and the cliff top. The method generates orthogonal transects and profiles with a minimum spacing equal to the digital elevation model resolution and extracts [...]
