This study presents an investigation of the changes that have occurred in the coastal ocean area of Kwangyang Bay located in the South Coastal region of Korea using remote sensing data based on Landsat Thematic Mapper (TM) multispectral digital data from 1988 and 1996. The coastal changes were detected using the digital histogram method and vector trace method. All the images were preprocessed, i.e. geometrically corrected, before the training set selection. when comparing the histograms of 7-band TM data, it was found that the band 5 image exhibited two critical Digital Number(DN) peaks, thereby indicating new coastal water and coastal land data. Based on this information, the coastal ocean area of the band 5 image was calculated using the vector tracing method supported by a CAD program. The result shows that the coastal ocean area decreased by about 5 % between 1988 to 1994. Accordingly, this gives a strong indication that the continuing land development will have a serious impact on the ecosystem of Kwangyang Bay.