Dans cette thèse nous étudions le problème de détection d’anomalies dans les données ouvertes utilisées par l’entreprise Qucit ; aussi bien les données métiers de ses clients, que celles permettant de les contextualiser. Dans un premier temps, nous nous sommes intéressés à la détection de vélos défectueux au sein des données de trajets du système de vélo en libre service de New York. Nous cherchons des données reflétant une anomalie dans la réalité. Des caractéristiques décrivant le comportement de chaque vélo observé sont partitionnés. Les comportements anormaux sont extraits depuis ce partitionnement et comparés aux rapports mensuels indiquant le nombre de vélos réparés ; c’est un problème d’apprentissage à sortie agrégée. Les résultats de ce premier travail se sont avérés insatisfaisant en raison de la pauvreté des données. Ce premier volet des travaux a ensuite laissé place à une problématique tournée vers la détection de bâtiments au sein d’images satellites. Nous cherchons des anomalies dans les données géographiques qui ne reflètent pas la réalité. Nous proposons une méthode de fusion de modèles de segmentation améliorant la métrique d’erreur jusqu’à +7% par rapport à la méthode standard. Nous évaluons la robustesse de notre modèle face à la suppression de bâtiments dans les étiquettes, afin de déterminer à quel point les omissions sont susceptibles d’en altérer les résultats. Ce type de bruit est communément rencontré au sein des données OpenStreetMap, régulièrement utilisées par Qucit, et la robustesse observée indique qu’il pourrait être corrigé. / In this thesis we study the problem of anomaly detection in the open data used by the Qucit company, both the business data of its customers, as well as those allowing to contextualize them.We are looking for data that reflects an anomaly in reality. Initially, we were interested in detecting defective bicycles in the trip data of New York’s bike share system. Characteristics describing the behaviour of each observed bicycle are clustered. Abnormal behaviors are extracted from this clustering and compared to monthly reports indicating the number of bikes repaired; this is an aggregate learning problem. The results of this first work were unsatisfactory due to the paucity of data. This first part of the work then gave way to a problem focused on the detection of buildings within satellite images. We are looking for anomalies in the geographical data that do not reflect reality. We propose a method of merging segmentation models that improves the error metric by up to +7% over the standard method. We assess the robustness of our model to the removal of buildings from labels to determine the extent to which omissions are likely to alter the results. This type of noise is commonly encountered within the OpenStreetMap data, regularly used by Qucit, and the robustness observed indicates that it could be corrected.

O inventário florestal é uma das principais ferramentas na gestão dos recursos florestais, uma vez que as informações geradas por ele são utilizadas ao longo de toda a cadeia produtiva do setor. Desta forma, erros nas estimativas volumétricas dos inventários florestais devem ser controlados. Inúmeras informações podem ser obtidas a partir de imagens orbitais ou aerotransportadas, uma vez que podem cobrir facilmente toda a área de interesse, e estão comumente disponíveis em empresas florestais ou ao usuário final. A utilização de preditores derivados das imagens pode trazer benefícios para as estimativas do inventário florestal. Desta forma, a aplicação de técnicas de regressão linear múltipla (RLM) ganhou espaço no setor devido a sua facilidade de aplicação. Porém, a RLM não leva em consideração a dependência espacial entre as unidades amostrais, sendo que a geoestatística pode ser utilizada para predizer a distribuição espacial do estoque de madeira (VTCC) para uma dada região. A modelagem geoestatística mais simples como a krigagem ordinária (KO), por considerar apenas a dependência espacial entre os pontos não amostrados, pode apresentar erros de predição nestes locais. Tais erros podem ser reduzidos com a aplicação de técnicas mais robustas como a Krigagem com Deriva Externa (KDE), pois esta agrega as informações obtidas das imagens com a distribuição espacial do volume. Buscando-se avaliar as vantagens da integração do Sensoriamento Remoto (SR) ao inventário florestal foram testados 4 tipos diferentes de imagens; as oriundas dos satélites LANDSAT8, RAPIDEYE e GEOEYE, e as provenientes de aeronaves (Imagens Aerotransportadas). Avaliou-se também diferentes tipos de estimativas para a predição volumétrica sendo estas RLM, KDE e KO. A melhor estimativa serviu de variável auxiliar para o estimador de regressão (ER), sendo os resultados comparados com a abordagem tradicional da amostragem aleatória simples (AAS). Os resultados demonstraram por meio da validação cruzada que as estimativas da KDE foram mais eficientes que as estimativas da KO e da RLM. Os melhores preditores (variáveis auxiliares) foram aqueles derivados do satélite LANDSAT8 e do satélite RAPIDEYE. Obteve-se como produto das estimativas de KDE e RLM mapas capazes de detectar áreas com mortalidade ou anomalias em meio a formação florestal. A utilização de uma estimativa de KDE utilizando imagens LANDSAT8 como medida auxiliar para o ER permitiu reduzir o erro amostral da AAS de 3,87% para 2,34%. Da maneira tradicional, tal redução de erro apenas seria possível com um aumento de mais 99 unidades amostrais. / Forest Inventory (FI) is one of the main tools for managing forest resources, once the information derived from FI is used along the sector production chain. When estimating volume, errors resulting from FI are common, therefore these errors must be controlled. Once orbital or airborne imaging data are easily acquired for an entire area, and are commonly available in forest companies or for the end user, much information can be obtained from these products. The use of predictor derived from images can be of significant benefits to forest inventory estimates. For that reason, the application of linear multiple regression (LMR) techniques have taken place in the forest sector, due to the facilities of its application. However, the LMR technique does not take the spatial dependence among sample units in consideration, the geostatistics utilized to predict the spatial distribution of the wood stock (VTCC) for a specific region. Simpler geostatistical modeling as the ordinary kriging (OK), just takes in consideration the spatial dependence among non-sampled points, because of that, prediction errors can be found. Such errors can be reduced when techniques that are more robust are applied, such as the kriging with external drift (KED) approach. This technique aggregates the information obtained from the images with the spatial distribution of the volume. In order to evaluate the advantages of Remote Sensing and Forest Inventory integration, we considered 4 different types of images, from the satellites LANSAT 8, RAPIDEYE, GEOEYE and from airborne images. When predicting volume, three different approaches were evaluated: LMR, EDK, OK. The best model among those evaluated, served as auxiliary variable for the regression estimator (RE). The result were then compared to the traditional approach, simple random sampling (SRS).This approach showed, through a cross-validation, that the KDE estimates were more efficiently than the OK and the LMR. The best predictor model (auxiliary variables) were derived from LADNSAT 8 and RAPIDEYE satellites. There is a significant advantage to using the KDE and LMR approaches, as it allows for a spatial representation of areas with mortality or anomalies, in a forest environment. The combination of KDE approach and LANDSAT 8 images as an auxiliary method for the RE, abled the decrease of the sampling error of SRS from 3.87% to 2.34%.The traditional approaches to conduct plantation inventories would allow for this error reduction, only if there were an increase of 99 more sampling units.

A computational grid is a hardware and software infrastructure that provides dependable, consistent, pervasive, and inexpensive access to high-end computational capabilities. This talk is divided into three parts. Firstly, we give an overview of the main issues in grid computing. Next, we introduce ALiCE (Adaptive and Scalable Internet-based Computing Engine), a platform independent and lightweight grid. ALiCE exploits object-level parallelism using our Object Network Transport Architecture (ONTA). Grid applications are written using ALiCE Object Programming Template that hides the complexities of the underlying grid fabric. Lastly, we present some performance results of ALiCE applications including the geo-rectification of satellite images and the progressive multiple sequence alignments problem. / Singapore-MIT Alliance (SMA)

Road extraction from satellite or aerial imagery is a popular topic in remote sensing, and there are many road extraction algorithms suggested by various researches. However, the need of reliable remotely sensed road information still persists as there is no sufficiently robust road extraction algorithm yet. In this study, we explore the road extraction problem taking advantage of the multi-resolution analysis and adaptive boosting based classifiers. That is, we propose a new road extraction algorithm exploiting both spectral and structural features of the high resolution multi-spectral satellite images. The proposed model is composed of three major components / feature extraction, classification and road detection. Well-known spectral band ratios are utilized to represent reflectance properties of the data whereas a segmentation operation followed by an elongatedness scoring technique renders structural evaluation of the road parts within the multi-resolution analysis framework. The extracted features are fed into Adaptive Boosting (Adaboost) learning procedure, and the learning method iteratively combines decision trees to acquire a classifier with a high accuracy. The road network is identified from the probability map constructed by the classifier suggested by Adaboost. The algorithm is designed to be modular in the sense of its extensibility, that is / new road descriptor features can be easily integrated into the existing model. The empirical evaluation of the proposed algorithm suggests that the algorithm is capable of extracting majority of the road network, and it poses promising performance results.

Useful information extraction from satellite images for the use of other higher level applications such as road network extraction and update, city planning etc. is a very important and active research area. It is seen that pixel-based techniques becomes insufficient for this task with increasing spatial resolution of satellite imaging sensors day by day. Therefore, the use of object-based techniques becomes indispensable and the segmentation method selection is very crucial for object-based techniques. In this thesis, various segmentation algorithms applied in remote sensing literature are presented and a segmentation process that is based on watersheds and multi-scale segmentation is proposed to use as the segmentation step of an object-based classifier. For every step of the proposed segmentation process, qualitative and quantitative comparisons with alternative approaches are done. The ones which provide best performance are incorporated into the proposed algorithm. Also, an unsupervised segmentation accuracy metric to determine all parameters of the algorithm is proposed. By this way, the proposed segmentation algorithm has become a fully automatic approach. Experiments that are done on a database formed with images taken from Google Earth&reg / software provide promising results.

Road Networks play an important role in various applications such as urban and rural planning, infrastructure planning, transportation management, vehicle navigation. Extraction of Roads from Remote Sensed satellite images for updating road database in geographical information systems (GIS) is generally done manually by a human operator. However, manual extraction of roads is time consuming and labor intensive process. In the existing literature, there are a great number of researches published for the purpose of automating the road extraction process. However, automated processes still yield some erroneous and incomplete results and human intervention is still required. The aim of this research is to propose a framework for road network extraction from high spatial resolution multi-spectral imagery (MSI) to improve the accuracy of road extraction systems. The proposed framework begins with a spectral classification using One-class Support Vector Machines (SVM) and Gaussian Mixture Models (GMM) classifiers. Spectral Classification exploits the spectral signature of road surfaces to classify road pixels. Then, an iterative template matching filter is proposed to refine spectral classification results. K-medians clustering algorithm is employed to detect candidate road centerline points. Final road network formation is achieved by Markov Random Fields. The extracted road network is evaluated against a reference dataset using a set of quality metrics.

As zonas costeiras estão em constante processo de pressão, tanto pela ação humana, que acaba rompendo o equilíbrio dominante, como pela ação da natureza, que está ligada principalmente a fatores geológicos, fatores climáticos e à dinâmica costeira. Neste trabalho buscou-se analisar a evolução do processo de ocupação urbana na faixa oceânica no município de Santa Vitória do Palmar, nos balneários do Hermenegildo e da Barra do Chuí, devido ao fato de esse local apresentar problemas em seu processo de urbanização, que se configuram pela falta de planejamento e de ordenamento territorial. Para essa análise, utilizou-se produtos de sensoriamento remoto em escala multitemporal, com perspectivas temporais em que se pode trabalhar e entender as rupturas de paradigmas em diferentes momentos históricos. Para isso, foram feitas análises em um levantamento aerofotogramétrico, adquirido pelo Exército Brasileiro, na Escala 1:75.000 do ano de 1964, análises em Imagens de Satélite Landsat TM7, do ano de 1996 e Imagens de Satélite QuickBird do ano de 2010. Portanto, esse trabalho propôs uma análise em escala multitemporal no processo de urbanização dos balneários do Hermenegildo e da Barra do Chuí, para um melhor entendimento do porquê dos problemas com as construções residenciais na faixa frontal ao Oceano Atlântico, que tem levando muitos moradores a perda total de suas residências. Verificou-se que a evolução dos percentuais de ocupação urbana nos balneários do Hermenegildo e da Barra do Chuí foi bastante significativa, sendo o que os dois balneários apresentaram crescimento mais elevado nas três primeiras décadas analisadas e ainda concluiu-se que no último intervalo da análise os índices de crescimento urbano foram menores para os dois balneários, recomendando-se maiores estudos e monitoramento dos vetores de crescimento urbano para ambos os balneários, com maior atenção para o balneário do Hermenegildo, devido ao grave problema de erosão costeira. / Coastal zones are constantly affected by the pressure process, caused by the human action, which ends up breaking the dominant balance, as well as by the action of the nature, which is mainly related to geologic and climatic factors and to the coastal dynamic. This study aims to analyze the urban occupation evolution process along Santa Vitória do Palmar coastline, especially Balneário do Hermenegildo and Balneário da Barra do Chuí, considering the fact that this specific territory presents lots of problems concerning its urbanization process. For this analysis, images captured by remote sensing were used in a multitemporal scale, trough time perspectives that enable this study to develop and understand the paradigmatic ruptures in different historical periods. In order to do so, different types of images were analyzed, such as the aerial photogrammetric survey, taken by the Brazilian Army, in the 1:75.000 scale of 1964, TM7 Landsat Satellite Images, taken in 1996, and QuickBird Satellite Images, taken in 2010. Therefore, this study promoted an analysis in a multitemporal scale of the urbanization process regarding the territory already mentioned, in order to discover the causes of the problems involving residential constructions located on the frontal area of the Atlantic Ocean, which might be the reason why the residents are totally losing their residences. It was found that the development of the urban occupation percentage in Balneário do Hermenegildo and Balneário da Barra do Chuí was very significant, based upon the fact that both beaches present a notorious increase on the first three analyzed decades and, beyond that, it was concluded that during the last interval of the analysis, the urban growth indices were lower for both, suggesting that this field demands more studies and monitoring of the urban growth vectors for both beaches, attaching particular attention to Balneário do Hermenegildo because of its severe coastal erosion problem.

A l'heure actuelle, les images satellites constituent une source d'information incontournable face à de nombreux enjeux environnementaux (déforestation, caractérisation des paysages, aménagement du territoire, etc.). En raison de leur complexité, de leur volume important et des besoins propres à chaque communauté, l'analyse et l'interprétation des images satellites imposent de nouveaux défis aux méthodes de fouille de données. Le parti-pris de cette thèse est d'explorer de nouvelles approches, que nous situons à mi-chemin entre représentation des connaissances et apprentissage statistique, dans le but de faciliter et d'automatiser l'extraction d'informations pertinentes du contenu de ces images. Nous avons, pour cela, proposé deux nouvelles méthodes qui considèrent les images comme des données quantitatives massives dépourvues de labels sémantiques et qui les traitent en se basant sur les connaissances disponibles. Notre première contribution est une approche hybride, qui exploite conjointement le raisonnement à base d'ontologie et le clustering semi-supervisé. Le raisonnement permet l'étiquetage sémantique des pixels à partir de connaissances issues du domaine concerné. Les labels générés guident ensuite la tâche de clustering, qui permet de découvrir de nouvelles classes tout en enrichissant l'étiquetage initial. Notre deuxième contribution procède de manière inverse. Dans un premier temps, l'approche s'appuie sur un clustering topographique pour résumer les données en entrée et réduire de ce fait le nombre de futures instances à traiter par le raisonnement. Celui-ci n'est alors appliqué que sur les prototypes résultant du clustering, l'étiquetage est ensuite propagé automatiquement à l'ensemble des données de départ. Dans ce cas, l'importance est portée sur l'optimisation du temps de raisonnement et à son passage à l'échelle. Nos deux approches ont été testées et évaluées dans le cadre de la classification et de l'interprétation d'images satellites. Les résultats obtenus sont prometteurs et montrent d'une part, que la qualité de la classification peut être améliorée par une prise en compte automatique des connaissances et que l'implication des experts peut être allégée, et d'autre part, que le recours au clustering topographique en amont permet d'éviter le calcul des inférences sur la totalité des pixels de l'image. / Satellite images have become a valuable source of information for Earth observation. They are used to address and analyze multiple environmental issues such as landscapes characterization, urban planning or biodiversity conservation to cite a few.Despite of the large number of existing knowledge extraction techniques, the complexity of satellite images, their large volume, and the specific needs of each community of practice, give rise to new challenges and require the development of highly efficient approaches.In this thesis, we investigate the potential of intelligent combination of knowledge representation systems with statistical learning. Our goal is to develop novel methods which allow automatic analysis of remote sensing images. We elaborate, in this context, two new approaches that consider the images as unlabeled quantitative data and examine the possible use of the available domain knowledge.Our first contribution is a hybrid approach, that successfully combines ontology-based reasoning and semi-supervised clustering for semantic classification. An inference engine first reasons over the available domain knowledge in order to obtain semantically labeled instances. These instances are then used to generate constraints that will guide and enhance the clustering. In this way, our method allows the improvement of the labeling of existing classes while discovering new ones.Our second contribution focuses on scaling ontology reasoning over large datasets. We propose a two step approach where topological clustering is first applied in order to summarize the data, in term of a set of prototypes, and reduces by this way the number of future instances to be treated by the reasoner. The representative prototypes are then labeled using the ontology and the labels automatically propagated to all the input data.We applied our methods to the real-word problem of satellite images classification and interpretation and the obtained results are very promising. They showed, on the one hand, that the quality of the classification can be improved by automatic knowledge integration and that the involvement of experts can be reduced. On the other hand, the upstream exploitation of topographic clustering avoids the calculation of the inferences on all the pixels of the image.

L'étude des surfaces continentales est devenue ces dernières années un enjeu majeur à l'échelle mondiale pour la gestion et le suivi des territoires, notamment en matière de consommation des terres agricoles et d'étalement urbain. Dans ce contexte, les cartes d'occupation du sol caractérisant la couverture biophysique des terres émergées jouent un rôle essentiel pour la cartographie des surfaces continentales. La production de ces cartes sur de grandes étendues s'appuie sur des données satellitaires qui permettent de photographier les surfaces continentales fréquemment et à faible coût. Le lancement de nouvelles constellations satellitaires - Landsat-8 et Sentinel-2 - permet depuis quelques années l'acquisition de séries temporelles à hautes résolutions. Ces dernières sont utilisées dans des processus de classification supervisée afin de produire les cartes d'occupation du sol. L'arrivée de ces nouvelles données ouvre de nouvelles perspectives, mais questionne sur le choix des algorithmes de classification et des données à fournir en entrée du système de classification. Outre les données satellitaires, les algorithmes de classification supervisée utilisent des échantillons d'apprentissage pour définir leur règle de décision. Dans notre cas, ces échantillons sont étiquetés, \ie{} la classe associée à une occupation des sols est connue. Ainsi, la qualité de la carte d'occupation des sols est directement liée à la qualité des étiquettes des échantillons d'apprentissage. Or, la classification sur de grandes étendues nécessite un grand nombre d'échantillons, qui caractérise la diversité des paysages. Cependant, la collecte de données de référence est une tâche longue et fastidieuse. Ainsi, les échantillons d'apprentissage sont bien souvent extraits d'anciennes bases de données pour obtenir un nombre conséquent d'échantillons sur l'ensemble de la surface à cartographier. Cependant, l'utilisation de ces anciennes données pour classer des images satellitaires plus récentes conduit à la présence de nombreuses données mal étiquetées parmi les échantillons d'apprentissage. Malheureusement, l'utilisation de ces échantillons mal étiquetés dans le processus de classification peut engendrer des erreurs de classification, et donc une détérioration de la qualité de la carte produite. L'objectif général de la thèse vise à améliorer la classification des nouvelles séries temporelles d'images satellitaires à hautes résolutions. Le premier objectif consiste à déterminer la stabilité et la robustesse des méthodes de classification sur de grandes étendues. Plus particulièrement, les travaux portent sur l'analyse d'algorithmes de classification et la sensibilité de ces algorithmes vis-à-vis de leurs paramètres et des données en entrée du système de classification. De plus, la robustesse de ces algorithmes à la présence des données imparfaites est étudiée. Le second objectif s'intéresse aux erreurs présentes dans les données d'apprentissage, connues sous le nom de données mal étiquetées. Dans un premier temps, des méthodes de détection de données mal étiquetées sont proposées et étudiées. Dans un second temps, un cadre méthodologique est proposé afin de prendre en compte les données mal étiquetées dans le processus de classification. L'objectif est de réduire l'influence des données mal étiquetées sur les performances de l'algorithme de classification, et donc d'améliorer la carte d'occupation des sols produite. / Land surface monitoring is a key challenge for diverse applications such as environment, forestry, hydrology and geology. Such monitoring is particularly helpful for the management of territories and the prediction of climate trends. For this purpose, mapping approaches that employ satellite-based Earth Observations at different spatial and temporal scales are used to obtain the land surface characteristics. More precisely, supervised classification algorithms that exploit satellite data present many advantages compared to other mapping methods. In addition, the recent launches of new satellite constellations - Landsat-8 and Sentinel-2 - enable the acquisition of satellite image time series at high spatial and spectral resolutions, that are of great interest to describe vegetation land cover. These satellite data open new perspectives, but also interrogate the choice of classification algorithms and the choice of input data. In addition, learning classification algorithms over large areas require a substantial number of instances per land cover class describing landscape variability. Accordingly, training data can be extracted from existing maps or specific existing databases, such as crop parcel farmer's declaration or government databases. When using these databases, the main drawbacks are the lack of accuracy and update problems due to a long production time. Unfortunately, the use of these imperfect training data lead to the presence of mislabeled training instance that may impact the classification performance, and so the quality of the produced land cover map. Taking into account the above challenges, this Ph.D. work aims at improving the classification of new satellite image time series at high resolutions. The work has been divided into two main parts. The first Ph.D. goal consists in studying different classification systems by evaluating two classification algorithms with several input datasets. In addition, the stability and the robustness of the classification methods are discussed. The second goal deals with the errors contained in the training data. Firstly, methods for the detection of mislabeled data are proposed and analyzed. Secondly, a filtering method is proposed to take into account the mislabeled data in the classification framework. The objective is to reduce the influence of mislabeled data on the classification performance, and thus to improve the produced land cover map.

As zonas costeiras estão em constante processo de pressão, tanto pela ação humana, que acaba rompendo o equilíbrio dominante, como pela ação da natureza, que está ligada principalmente a fatores geológicos, fatores climáticos e à dinâmica costeira. Neste trabalho buscou-se analisar a evolução do processo de ocupação urbana na faixa oceânica no município de Santa Vitória do Palmar, nos balneários do Hermenegildo e da Barra do Chuí, devido ao fato de esse local apresentar problemas em seu processo de urbanização, que se configuram pela falta de planejamento e de ordenamento territorial. Para essa análise, utilizou-se produtos de sensoriamento remoto em escala multitemporal, com perspectivas temporais em que se pode trabalhar e entender as rupturas de paradigmas em diferentes momentos históricos. Para isso, foram feitas análises em um levantamento aerofotogramétrico, adquirido pelo Exército Brasileiro, na Escala 1:75.000 do ano de 1964, análises em Imagens de Satélite Landsat TM7, do ano de 1996 e Imagens de Satélite QuickBird do ano de 2010. Portanto, esse trabalho propôs uma análise em escala multitemporal no processo de urbanização dos balneários do Hermenegildo e da Barra do Chuí, para um melhor entendimento do porquê dos problemas com as construções residenciais na faixa frontal ao Oceano Atlântico, que tem levando muitos moradores a perda total de suas residências. Verificou-se que a evolução dos percentuais de ocupação urbana nos balneários do Hermenegildo e da Barra do Chuí foi bastante significativa, sendo o que os dois balneários apresentaram crescimento mais elevado nas três primeiras décadas analisadas e ainda concluiu-se que no último intervalo da análise os índices de crescimento urbano foram menores para os dois balneários, recomendando-se maiores estudos e monitoramento dos vetores de crescimento urbano para ambos os balneários, com maior atenção para o balneário do Hermenegildo, devido ao grave problema de erosão costeira. / Coastal zones are constantly affected by the pressure process, caused by the human action, which ends up breaking the dominant balance, as well as by the action of the nature, which is mainly related to geologic and climatic factors and to the coastal dynamic. This study aims to analyze the urban occupation evolution process along Santa Vitória do Palmar coastline, especially Balneário do Hermenegildo and Balneário da Barra do Chuí, considering the fact that this specific territory presents lots of problems concerning its urbanization process. For this analysis, images captured by remote sensing were used in a multitemporal scale, trough time perspectives that enable this study to develop and understand the paradigmatic ruptures in different historical periods. In order to do so, different types of images were analyzed, such as the aerial photogrammetric survey, taken by the Brazilian Army, in the 1:75.000 scale of 1964, TM7 Landsat Satellite Images, taken in 1996, and QuickBird Satellite Images, taken in 2010. Therefore, this study promoted an analysis in a multitemporal scale of the urbanization process regarding the territory already mentioned, in order to discover the causes of the problems involving residential constructions located on the frontal area of the Atlantic Ocean, which might be the reason why the residents are totally losing their residences. It was found that the development of the urban occupation percentage in Balneário do Hermenegildo and Balneário da Barra do Chuí was very significant, based upon the fact that both beaches present a notorious increase on the first three analyzed decades and, beyond that, it was concluded that during the last interval of the analysis, the urban growth indices were lower for both, suggesting that this field demands more studies and monitoring of the urban growth vectors for both beaches, attaching particular attention to Balneário do Hermenegildo because of its severe coastal erosion problem.