RipAlert: A Future-Frame-Aware Framework for Rip Current Forecasting and Early Alerting

Abstract

Rip currents cause over 100 drowning deaths and more than 30,000 rescues annually in the United States, posing a severe threat to beach safety worldwide. However, most existing detection methods are reactive, identifying rip currents only after they form, leaving limited time for intervention. We propose RipAlert, a future-frame-aware framework that forecasts near-future coastal dynamics and proactively identifies rip current risks. We design a region-sensitive optical flow prediction method with a novel entropy-based object detector to capture early-stage reverse-flow anomalies. Unlike static-image approaches, RipAlert leverages temporal motion patterns to detect rip currents up to 5 seconds before they visibly form. To support real-world deployment, we design a lightweight mobile application and release a curated dataset with over 2,000 annotated images. Experiments on the RipVIS benchmark show that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance. The system has been deployed at high-risk beaches in China, issuing successful early warnings over real-world events. Our work advances AI-driven coastal safety and contributes to SDG 3 (Good Health and Well-Being) and SDG 13 (Climate Action).