Remote monitoring of coastal conditions in locations of high public usage is a fast growing application of informa tion technology. Remote mounted CCD camera systems provide a relatively cheap and potentially rich source of in formation on the state of the near-shore beach zone. The present paper presents a non-technical overview of a sys tem for appropriate feature extraction and integration with other sources of weather and wave data for the purpose of assessing and predicting beach safety conditions using neu ral network based models. The feasibility of combined im age processing and feature extraction routines for providing real-time input to neural network models of beach safety is demonstrated.