Detecting and quantifying marine pollution and macro-plastics is an increasingly pressing ecological issue that directly impacts ecology and human health. Efforts to quantify marine pollution are often conducted with sparse and expensive beach surveys, which are difficult to conduct on a large scale. Here, remote sensing can provide reliable estimates of plastic pollution by regularly monitoring and detecting marine debris in coastal areas. Medium-resolution satellite data of coastal areas is readily available and can be leveraged to detect aggregations of marine debris containing plastic litter. In this work, we present a detector for marine debris built on a deep segmentation model that outputs a probability for marine debris at the pixel level. We train this detector with a combination of annotated datasets of marine debris and evaluate it on specifically selected test sites where it is highly probable that plastic pollution is present in the detected marine debris. We demonstrate quantitatively and qualitatively that a deep learning model trained on this dataset issued from multiple sources outperforms existing detection models trained on previous datasets by a large margin. Our experiments show, consistent with the principles of data-centric AI, that this performance is due to our particular dataset design with extensive sampling of negative examples and label refinements rather than depending on the particular deep learning model. We hope to accelerate advances in the large-scale automated detection of marine debris, which is a step towards quantifying and monitoring marine litter with remote sensing at global scales, and release the model weights and training source code under https://github.com/marccoru/marinedebrisdetector
The increasing level of marine plastic pollution poses severe threats to the marine ecosystem and biodiversity. The present study attempted to explore the full functionality of open Sentinel satellite data and ML models for detecting and classifying floating plastic debris in Mytilene (Greece), Limassol (Cyprus), Calabria (Italy), and Beirut (Lebanon). Two ML models, i.e. Support Vector Machine (SVM) and Random Forest (RF) were utilized to carry out the classification analysis. In-situ plastic location data was collected from the control experiment conducted in Mytilene, Greece and Limassol, C…
Garbage and waste disposal is one of the biggest challenges currently faced by mankind. Proper waste disposal and recycling is a must in any sustainable community, and in many coastal areas there is significant water pollution in the form of floating or submerged garbage. This is called marine debris. Submerged marine debris threatens marine life, and for shallow coastal areas, it can also threaten fishing vessels [Iñiguez et al. 2016, Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews]. Submerged marine debris typically stays in the environment for a long time (20+ years), and consists of materials tha…
Automatized marine vessel monitoring from sentinel-1 data using convolution neural network
Center for Environment & Water, Research Institute, King Fahd University of Petroleum & Minerals（法赫德国王石油与矿产大学环境与水研究中心）；University of Petroleum and Energy Studies（石油与能源研究大学）；Dr. B.C. Roy Engineering College（B.C.罗伊博士工程学院）；CubicX
针对传统 CFAR 船舶检测缺乏决策能力的问题，提出基于小波变换的卷积神经网络，利用 Sentinel-1 双极化 SAR 数据实现印度西海岸繁忙交通场景下的船舶自动识别，检测准确率达 95.46%。
SAMSelect: A Spectral Index Search for Marine Debris Visualization using Segment Anything
Laboratory of Geo-information Science and Remote Sensing, Wageningen University（地理信息科学与遥感实验室，瓦赫宁根大学）；Fundamental AI Lab at the University of Technology Nuremberg（技术大学纽伦堡的基础人工智能实验室）
本文提出 SAMSelect 算法，利用 Segment Anything Model 在小型标注数据上搜索最佳三通道波段或光谱指数组合，以增强 Sentinel-2 海洋垃圾目视解译，并在多地场景中验证其优于文献指数。
Waterline usually plays as an important visual cue for maritime applications. However, the visual complexity of inland waterline presents a significant challenge for the development of highly efficient computer vision algorithms tailored for waterline detection in a complicated inland water environment. This paper attempts to find a solution to guarantee the effectiveness of waterline detection for inland maritime applications with general digital camera sensor. To this end, a general deep-learning-based paradigm applicable in variable inland waters, named DeepWL, is proposed, which concerns t…
University of Massachusetts, Lowell（马萨诸塞大学洛厄尔分校）；MIT Sea Grant（麻省理工学院海洋基金办公室）；Massachusetts Institute of Technology Laboratory for Autonomous Marine Sensing Systems（麻省理工学院自主海洋传感系统实验室）；Sunrise Setting Ltd（日出设定有限公司）；SAGE Publications Ltd（SAGE出版有限公司）
Recent advances in deep learning technology have triggered radical progress in the autonomy of ground vehicles. Marine coastal Autonomous Surface Vehicles (ASVs) that are regularly used for surveillance, monitoring and other routine tasks can benefit from this autonomy. Long haul deep sea transportation activities are additional opportunities. These two use cases present very different terrains -- the first being coastal waters -- with many obstacles, structures and human presence while the latter is mostly devoid of such obstacles. Variations in environmental conditions are common to both ter…
Deep learning-based object detection of offshore platforms on Sentinel-1 Imagery and the impact of synthetic training data
German Remote Sensing Data Center, Earth Observation Center, EOC of the German Aerospace Center, DLR（德国遥感数据中心，地球观测中心，德国航空航天中心（DLR）东部观测中心）；Institute for Geography and Geology, Department of Remote Sensing, University of Würzburg（地理与地质研究所，遥感系，乌尔姆大学）
PLAS-Net: Pixel-Level Area Segmentation for UAV-Based Beach Litter Monitoring
Graduate School of Frontier Sciences, The University of Tokyo, Japan（前沿科学研究生院，东京大学，日本）；Department of Urban Informatics, Shenzhen University, China（城市信息化系，深圳大学，中国）
Global Fishing Watch（全球渔业观察）；Cambrio；Defense Innovation Unit（国防创新单元）；UC Berkeley（加州大学伯克利分校）
Unsustainable fishing practices worldwide pose a major threat to marine resources and ecosystems. Identifying vessels that do not show up in conventional monitoring systems -- known as ``dark vessels'' -- is key to managing and securing the health of marine environments. With the rise of satellite-based synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imaging and modern machine learning (ML), it is now possible to automate detection of dark vessels day or night, under all-weather conditions. SAR images, however, require a domain-specific treatment and are not widely accessible to the ML community. Maritime obje…
