UAV-Based Oil Leakage Spot Detection Under Complex Illumination via a Collaborative Low-Light Enhancement and...

Area of Science:

• Environmental Science
• Remote Sensing Technology
• Artificial Intelligence

Background:

• Oilfield safety and environmental protection rely on accurate oil leakage detection.
• Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) inspections face challenges due to complex illumination conditions (low light, shadows) that obscure oil leakage features.
• Existing methods struggle to preserve fine leakage details during enhancement and effectively distinguish targets from backgrounds.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop a robust framework for oil leakage spot detection in onshore oilfields under complex illumination conditions.
• To jointly optimize low-light image enhancement and object detection for improved accuracy and detail preservation.
• To address the specific challenge of enhancing visibility while maintaining crucial leakage cues for detection.

Main Methods:

• A collaborative framework integrating a Retinex-based enhancement network and an improved YOLOv11 detector.
• The enhancement network incorporates multi-scale feature aggregation, NAFNet denoising, and CBAM attention for detail preservation.
• The detector utilizes an AC-FPN module to enhance multi-scale feature fusion and suppress background interference.

Main Results:

• The proposed method achieved a precision of 94.25% and a mean average precision (mAP) of 87.54% on UAV oilfield datasets.
• Demonstrated superior performance compared to existing approaches in detecting oil leakage spots under challenging lighting.
• Successfully preserved fine leakage details during enhancement while improving detection accuracy.

Conclusions:

• The developed framework offers an effective and robust solution for detecting oil leakage spots using UAVs in complex illumination environments.
• The joint optimization of enhancement and detection significantly improves the reliability of oilfield inspections.
• This approach enhances safety and environmental protection in oilfield operations.