Segmentation of Oil Spills on Side-Looking Airborne Radar imagery with Autoencoders

In this work, we use deep neural autoencoders to segment oil spills from Side-Looking Airborne Radar (SLAR) imagery. Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) has been much exploited for ocean surface monitoring, especially for oil pollution detection, but few approaches in the literature use SLAR. Our sensor consists of two SAR antennas mounted on an aircraft, enabling a quicker response than satellite sensors for emergency services when an oil spill occurs. Experiments on TERMA radar were carried out to detect oil spills on Spanish coasts using deep selectional autoencoders and RED-nets (very deep Residual Encoder-Decoder Networks). Different configurations of these networks were evaluated and the best topology significantly outperformed previous approaches, correctly detecting 100% of the spills and obtaining an F 1 score of 93.01% at the pixel level. The proposed autoencoders perform accurately in SLAR imagery that has artifacts and noise caused by the aircraft maneuvers, in different weather conditions and with the presence of look-alikes due to natural phenomena such as shoals of fish and seaweed

Segmentation of SLAR Imagery with Convolutional LSTM Selectional AutoEncoders

We present a method to detect maritime oil spills from Side-Looking Airborne Radar (SLAR) sensors mounted on aircraft in order to enable a quick response of emergency services when an oil spill occurs. The proposed approach introduces a new type of neural architecture named Convolutional Long Short Term Memory Selectional AutoEncoders (CMSAE) which allows the simultaneous segmentation of multiple classes such as coast, oil spill and ships. Unlike previous works using full SLAR images, in this work only a few scanlines from the beam-scanning of radar are needed to perform the detection. The main objective is to develop a method that performs accurate segmentation using only the current and previous sensor information, in order to return a real-time response during the flight. The proposed architecture uses a series of CMSAE networks to process in parallel each of the objectives defined as different classes. The output of these networks are given to a machine learning classifier to perform the final detection. Results show that the proposed approach can reliably detect oil spills and other maritime objects in SLAR sequences, outperforming the accuracy of previous state-of-the-art methods and with a response time of only 0.76 s.This research was funded by both the Spanish Government’s Ministry of Economy, Industry and Competitiveness, European Regional Development Funds and Babcock MCS Spain through the RTC-2014-1863-8 and INAER4-14Y(IDI-20141234) projects

Two-Stage Convolutional Neural Network for Ship and Spill Detection Using SLAR Images

This paper presents a system for the detection of ships and oil spills using side-looking airborne radar (SLAR) images. The proposed method employs a two-stage architecture composed of three pairs of convolutional neural networks (CNNs). Each pair of networks is trained to recognize a single class (ship, oil spill, and coast) by following two steps: a first network performs a coarse detection, and then, a second specialized CNN obtains the precise localization of the pixels belonging to each class. After classification, a postprocessing stage is performed by applying a morphological opening filter in order to eliminate small look-alikes, and removing those oil spills and ships that are surrounded by a minimum amount of coast. Data augmentation is performed to increase the number of samples, owing to the difficulty involved in obtaining a sufficient number of correctly labeled SLAR images. The proposed method is evaluated and compared to a single multiclass CNN architecture and to previous state-of-the-art methods using accuracy, precision, recall, F-measure, and intersection over union. The results show that the proposed method is efficient and competitive, and outperforms the approaches previously used for this task.This work was supported in part by the Spanish Government’s Ministry of Economy, Industry, and Competitiveness under Project RTC-2014-1863-8 and in part by Babcock MCS Spain under Project INAER4-14Y (IDI-20141234)

Oil Spill Detection in Terma-Side-Looking Airborne Radar Images Using Image Features and Region Segmentation

This work presents a method for oil-spill detection on Spanish coasts using aerial Side-Looking Airborne Radar (SLAR) images, which are captured using a Terma sensor. The proposed method uses grayscale image processing techniques to identify the dark spots that represent oil slicks on the sea. The approach is based on two steps. First, the noise regions caused by aircraft movements are detected and labeled in order to avoid the detection of false-positives. Second, a segmentation process guided by a map saliency technique is used to detect image regions that represent oil slicks. The results show that the proposed method is an improvement on the previous approaches for this task when employing SLAR images.This work was supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness through the ONTIME research project (RTC-2014-1863-8)

Offshore oil spill detection using synthetic aperture radar

Among the different types of marine pollution, oil spill has been considered as a major threat to the sea ecosystems. The source of the oil pollution can be located on the mainland or directly at sea. The sources of oil pollution at sea are discharges coming from ships, offshore platforms or natural seepage from sea bed. Oil pollution from sea-based sources can be accidental or deliberate. Different sensors to detect and monitor oil spills could be onboard vessels, aircraft, or satellites. Vessels equipped with specialised radars, can detect oil at sea but they can cover a very limited area. One of the established ways to monitor sea-based oil pollution is the use of satellites equipped with Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR).The aim of the work presented in this thesis is to identify optimum set of feature extracted parameters and implement methods at various stages for oil spill detection from Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) imagery. More than 200 images of ERS-2, ENVSAT and RADARSAT 2 SAR sensor have been used to assess proposed feature vector for oil spill detection methodology, which involves three stages: segmentation for dark spot detection, feature extraction and classification of feature vector. Unfortunately oil spill is not only the phenomenon that can create a dark spot in SAR imagery. There are several others meteorological and oceanographic and wind induced phenomena which may lead to a dark spot in SAR imagery. Therefore, these dark objects also appear similar to the dark spot due to oil spill and are called as look-alikes. These look-alikes thus cause difficulty in detecting oil spill spots as their primary characteristic similar to oil spill spots. To get over this difficulty, feature extraction becomes important; a stage which may involve selection of appropriate feature extraction parameters. The main objective of this dissertation is to identify the optimum feature vector in order to segregate oil spill and ‘look-alike’ spots. A total of 44 Feature extracted parameters have been studied. For segmentation, four methods; based on edge detection, adaptive theresholding, artificial neural network (ANN) segmentation and the other on contrast split segmentation have been implemented. Spot features are extracted from both the dark spots themselves and their surroundings. Classification stage was performed using two different classification techniques, first one is based on ANN and the other based on a two-stage processing that combines classification tree analysis and fuzzy logic. A modified feature vector, including both new and improved features, is suggested for better description of different types of dark spots. An ANN classifier using full spectrum of feature parameters has also been developed and evaluated. The implemented methodology appears promising in detecting dark spots and discriminating oil spills from look-alikes and processing time is well below any operational service requirements

Remote Sensing Applications in Coastal Environment

Coastal regions are susceptible to rapid changes, as they constitute the boundary between the land and the sea. The resilience of a particular segment of coast depends on many factors, including climate change, sea-level changes, natural and technological hazards, extraction of natural resources, population growth, and tourism. Recent research highlights the strong capabilities for remote sensing applications to monitor, inventory, and analyze the coastal environment. This book contains 12 high-quality and innovative scientific papers that explore, evaluate, and implement the use of remote sensing sensors within both natural and built coastal environments

Ocean Remote Sensing with Synthetic Aperture Radar

The ocean covers approximately 71% of the Earth’s surface, 90% of the biosphere and contains 97% of Earth’s water. The Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) can image the ocean surface in all weather conditions and day or night. SAR remote sensing on ocean and coastal monitoring has become a research hotspot in geoscience and remote sensing. This book—Progress in SAR Oceanography—provides an update of the current state of the science on ocean remote sensing with SAR. Overall, the book presents a variety of marine applications, such as, oceanic surface and internal waves, wind, bathymetry, oil spill, coastline and intertidal zone classification, ship and other man-made objects’ detection, as well as remotely sensed data assimilation. The book is aimed at a wide audience, ranging from graduate students, university teachers and working scientists to policy makers and managers. Efforts have been made to highlight general principles as well as the state-of-the-art technologies in the field of SAR Oceanography

The SAR Handbook: Comprehensive Methodologies for Forest Monitoring and Biomass Estimation

This Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) handbook of applied methods for forest monitoring and biomass estimation has been developed by SERVIR in collaboration with SilvaCarbon to address pressing needs in the development of operational forest monitoring services. Despite the existence of SAR technology with all-weather capability for over 30 years, the applied use of this technology for operational purposes has proven difficult. This handbook seeks to provide understandable, easy-to-assimilate technical material to remote sensing specialists that may not have expertise on SAR but are interested in leveraging SAR technology in the forestry sector

Oil spill and ship detection using high resolution polarimetric X-band SAR data

Among illegal human activities, marine pollution and target detection are the key concern of Maritime Security and Safety. This thesis deals with oil spill and ship detection using high resolution X-band polarimetric SAR (PolSAR). Polarimetry aims at analysing the polarization state of a wave field, in order to obtain physical information from the observed object. In this dissertation PolSAR techniques are suggested as improvement of the current State-of-the-Art of SAR marine pollution and target detection, by examining in depth Near Real Time suitability

Remote Sensing

This dual conception of remote sensing brought us to the idea of preparing two different books; in addition to the first book which displays recent advances in remote sensing applications, this book is devoted to new techniques for data processing, sensors and platforms. We do not intend this book to cover all aspects of remote sensing techniques and platforms, since it would be an impossible task for a single volume. Instead, we have collected a number of high-quality, original and representative contributions in those areas