Abstract: A new method for accurately surveying and mapping the shoreline of an island is proposed where the theoretically shoreline defined by the high water (MHHW) is adopted as the shoreline indicator of the island. This method utilizes the height of the instantaneous shoreline extracted from the aerial images to obtain the height of the shoreline by combining the precise ocean tide model and the height of the instantaneous shoreline, and then the horizontal position of the shoreline can be tracked by the stereo imaging and mapping method with the obtained height of MHHW. The proposed method can keep and ensure the continuity and uniqueness of the shoreline relative to the field measurements for shoreline mapping, and this method can be widely applied to large-scale shoreline mapping of mainland and islands.Experimental test indicates that the height accuracy can reach 0.2 m and it can be applied to the island mapping of the scale 1:2000.

Key words: island shoreline, stereo mapping, instantaneous water level, ocean tide