A novel feature enhancement and semantic segmentation scheme for identifying low-contrast ocean oil spills

The oil spill accidents on the sea surface pose a severe threat to the marine environment and human health. This paper proposes a novel Semantic Segmentation Network (SSN) for processing oil spill images so that low-contrast oil spills on the sea surface can be accurately identified. After the detection accuracy and real-time performance of the current SSNs are compared, the basic network architecture of DeeplabV3+ based target detection is analyzed. The standard convolution is replaced by the Omni-dimensional Dynamic Convolution (ODConv) in the Ghost Module Depth-Wise separable Convolution (DWConv) to further enhance the feature extraction ability of the network. Furthermore, a new DeeplabV3+ based network with ODGhostNetV2 is constructed as the main feature extraction module, and an Adaptive Triplet Attention (ATA) module is deployed in the encoder and decoder at the same time. This not only improves the richness of semantic features but also increases the following receptive fields of the network model. ATA integrates the Adaptively Spatial Feature Fusion (ASFF) module to optimize the weight assignment problem in the feature map fusion process. The ablation experiments are conducted to verify the proposed network which show high accuracy and good real-time performance for the oil spill detection.