A Deep-Learning Framework for the Detection of Oil Spills from SAR Data

Oil leaks onto water surfaces from big tankers, ships, and pipeline cracks cause considerable damage and harm to the marine environment. Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) images provide an approximate representation for target scenes, including sea and land surfaces, ships, oil spills, and look-alikes. Detection and segmentation of oil spills from SAR images are crucial to aid in leak cleanups and protecting the environment. This paper introduces a two-stage deep-learning framework for the identification of oil spill occurrences based on a highly unbalanced dataset. The first stage classifies patches based on the percentage of oil spill pixels using a novel 23-layer Convolutional Neural Network. In contrast, the second stage performs semantic segmentation using a five-stage U-Net structure. The generalized Dice loss is minimized to account for the reduced oil spill representation in the patches. The results of this study are very promising and provide a comparable improved precision and Dice score compared to related work.