A Two-Stage Deep Learning Method for Marine Oil Spill Localization and Segmentation From Synthetic Aperture Radar Images

Oil spills have devastating impacts on ocean ecosystems, leading to significant economic losses. Consequently, it is crucial to develop effective techniques for the rapid detection of marine oil spills using satellite observations. Existing methods for detecting oil spills using synthetic aperture r...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Xudong Huang, Biao Zhang, William Perrie
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: IEEE 2025-01-01
Series:IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Applied Earth Observations and Remote Sensing
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Online Access:https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/10990149/
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Summary:Oil spills have devastating impacts on ocean ecosystems, leading to significant economic losses. Consequently, it is crucial to develop effective techniques for the rapid detection of marine oil spills using satellite observations. Existing methods for detecting oil spills using synthetic aperture radar (SAR) often face challenges related to algorithm complexity, limited data availability, and practical implementation. To address these issues, we propose a two-stage deep learning (DL) method to automatically localize and segment oil spills in Sentinel-1 SAR images. First, we utilize the faster R-CNN model to identify oil spill locations. Subsequently, subimages containing the oil spills are input into the UNet<sup>&#x002B;&#x002B;</sup> model to achieve pixel-wise segmentation. We have created a comprehensive dataset consisting of 3166 well-annotated oil spill samples derived from 1000 Sentinel-1 VV-polarized SAR images. This unique dataset will be used for training, validation, and testing the two DL models. Experimental results indicate that the precision and recall for oil spill localization are 87.46&#x0025; and 87.59&#x0025;, respectively, while for oil spill segmentation, they are 89.55&#x0025; and 89.37&#x0025;. The proposed method demonstrates optimal oil detection performance at wind speeds between 2 and 10 m&#x002F;s. Furthermore, the total runtime for oil spill localization and segmentation is less than 1 min for each full-resolution SAR image. These results suggest that the proposed approach has strong potential for operational oil spill monitoring using spaceborne SAR images.
ISSN:1939-1404
2151-1535