Marine oil spills are urgent environmental hazards that demand rapid and reliable detection to minimise ecological and economic damage. While Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) imagery has become a key tool for large-scale oil spill monitoring, most existing detection methods rely on deep learning-based segmentation applied to single SAR images. These static approaches struggle to distinguish true oil spills from visually similar oceanic features (e.g., biogenic slicks or low-wind zones), leading to high false positive rates and limited generalizability, especially under data-scarce conditions. To overcome these limitations, we introduce Oil Spill Change Detection (OSCD), a new bi-temporal task that focuses on identifying changes between pre- and post-spill SAR images. As real co-registered pre-spill imagery is not always available, we propose the Temporal-Aware Hybrid Inpainting (TAHI) framework, which generates synthetic pre-spill images from post-spill SAR data. TAHI integrates two key components: High-Fidelity Hybrid Inpainting for oil-free reconstruction, and Temporal Realism Enhancement for radiometric and sea-state consistency. Using TAHI, we construct the first OSCD dataset and benchmark several state-of-the-art change detection models. Results show that OSCD significantly reduces false positives and improves detection accuracy compared to conventional segmentation, demonstrating the value of temporally-aware methods for reliable, scalable oil spill monitoring in real-world scenarios.
Compositional Oil Spill Detection Based on Object Detector and Adapted Segment Anything Model from SAR Images
The Hong Kong Polytechnic University（香港理工大学）；Research Institute for Sustainable Urban Development, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University（香港理工大学可持续城市发展研究院）
OSDMamba: Enhancing Oil Spill Detection from Remote Sensing Images Using Selective State Space Model
Department of Computer Science, University of Exeter（计算机科学系，埃克塞特大学）；College of Oceanography and Space Informatics, China University of Petroleum (East China)（海洋科学与空间信息学院，中国石油大学（华东））
NORCE the Norwegian Research Center（挪威NORCE研究中心）；UiT the Arctic University of Norway（挪威北极大学）
We propose a deep learning framework to detect and categorize oil spills in synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images at a large scale. By means of a carefully designed neural network model for image segmentation trained on an extensive dataset, we are able to obtain state-of-the-art performance in oil spill detection, achieving results that are comparable to results produced by human operators. We also introduce a classification task, which is novel in the context of oil spill detection in SAR. Specifically, after being detected, each oil spill is also classified according to different categories…
Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) is the main instrument utilized for the detection of oil slicks on the ocean surface. In SAR images, some areas affected by ocean phenomena, such as rain cells, upwellings, and internal waves, or discharge from oil spills appear as dark spots on images. Dark spot detection is the first step in the detection of oil spills, which then become oil slick candidates. The accuracy of dark spot segmentation ultimately affects the accuracy of oil slick identification. Although some advanced deep learning methods that use pixels as processing units perform well in remote s…
Univ. Savoie Mont Blanc（萨瓦大学）；TotalEnergies S.E.（道达尔能源公司）
Ocean surface monitoring, especially oil slick detection, has become mandatory due to its importance for oil exploration and risk prevention on ecosystems. For years, the detection task has been performed manually by photo-interpreters using Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) images with the help of contextual data such as wind. This tedious manual work cannot handle the increasing amount of data collected by the available sensors and thus requires automation. Literature reports conventional and semi-automated detection methods that generally focus either on oil slicks originating from anthropogen…
Facultad de Ingeniería, Universidad de Buenos Aires（布宜诺斯艾利斯大学工程学院）；Universidad Nacional de Tierra del Fuego, Antártida e Islas del Atlántico Sur（火地岛、南极和南大西洋岛屿国立大学）；Instituto Argentino de Matemática ”A. P. Calderón”, IAM, CONICET（阿根廷数学研究所“AP卡尔德隆”（IAM），阿根廷国家科学技术研究委员会（CONICET））；Instituto de Ciencias Polares, Ambiente y Recursos Naturales（极地、环境和自然资源研究所）
In this note we deal with the detection of oil spills in open sea via self similar, long range dependence random fields and wavelet filters. We show some preliminary experimental results of our technique with Sentinel 1 SAR images.
Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology（夸梅·恩克鲁玛科技大学）
Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) imagery to monitor oil spills are some methods that have been proposed for the West African sub-region. With the increase in the number of oil exploration companies in Ghana (and her neighbors) and the rise in the coastal activities in the sub-region, there is the need for proper monitoring of the environmental impact of these socio-economic activities on the environment. Detection and near real-time information about oil spills are fundamental in reducing oil spill environmental impact. SAR images are prone to some noise, which is predominantly speckle noise aro…
SAM2-ELNet: Label Enhancement and Automatic Annotation for Remote Sensing Segmentation
College of Instrumentation and Electrical Engineering, Jilin University（吉林大学仪器电气工程学院）；Key Laboratory of Geophysical Exploration Equipment, Ministry of Education（教育部地球物理探测装备重点实验室）；School of Mathematics, Jilin University（吉林大学数学学院）
Enhancing Cross Domain SAR Oil Spill Segmentation via Morphological Region Perturbation and Synthetic Label-to-SAR Generation
Círculo de Investigación de Máquinas de Aprendizaje (CIMA), Universidad Nacional Agraria La Molina（机器学习研究圈（CIMA）、拉莫林农业国立大学）；Departamento de Estadística e Informática, Facultad de Economía y Planificación, Universidad Nacional Agraria La Molina（统计与信息技术系、经济与规划学院、拉莫林农业国立大学）
Idea-re S.r.l.（Idea-re有限责任公司）；Guglielmo Marconi University（古列尔莫·马可尼大学）；Alma Mater Studiorum Università di Bologna（博洛尼亚大学）
In this work, we describe in detail how Deep Learning and Computer Vision can help to detect fault events of the AirTender system, an aftermarket motorcycle damping system component. One of the most effective ways to monitor the AirTender functioning is to look for oil stains on its surface. Starting from real-time images, AirTender is first detected in the motorbike suspension system, simulated indoor, and then, a binary classifier determines whether AirTender is spilling oil or not. The detection is made with the help of the Yolo5 architecture, whereas the classification is carried out with …
In this work, we present a methodology for monitoring man-made, construction-like activities in low-resolution SAR imagery. Our source of data is the European Space Agency Sentinel-l satellite which provides global coverage at a 12-day revisit rate. Despite limitations in resolution, our methodology enables us to monitor activity levels (i.e. presence of vehicles, equipment) of a pre-defined location by analyzing the texture of detected SAR imagery. Using an exploratory dataset, we trained a support vector machine (SVM), a random binary forest, and a fully-connected neural network for classifi…
