LIGHTHOUSE: Fast and precise distance to shoreline calculations from anywhere on earth

TL;DR

This paper presents LIGHTHOUSE, a novel algorithm and high-resolution dataset enabling rapid, precise coastal distance calculations globally, significantly improving over existing coarse datasets and suitable for real-time, resource-limited applications.

Contribution

The paper introduces a 10-meter resolution global coastline dataset and the LIGHTHOUSE algorithm, a resource-efficient library for fast, accurate coastal distance computations from anywhere on Earth.

Findings

Provides a 10-meter resolution coastline dataset, a 100-fold improvement.

Lighthouse achieves millisecond inference with minimal resources.

Enables real-time coastal distance calculations globally.

Abstract

We introduce a new dataset and algorithm for fast and efficient coastal distance calculations from Anywhere on Earth (AoE). Existing global coastal datasets are only available at coarse resolution (e.g. 1-4 km) which limits their utility. Publicly available satellite imagery combined with computer vision enable much higher precision. We provide a global coastline dataset at 10 meter resolution, a 100+ fold improvement in precision over existing data. To handle the computational challenge of querying at such an increased scale, we introduce a new library: Layered Iterative Geospatial Hierarchical Terrain-Oriented Unified Search Engine (Lighthouse). Lighthouse is both exceptionally fast and resource-efficient, requiring only 1 CPU and 2 GB of RAM to achieve millisecond online inference, making it well suited for real-time applications in resource-constrained environments.