A novel deep learning instance segmentation model for automated marine oil spill detection

Abstract The visual similarity of oil slick and other elements, known as look-alike, affects the reliability of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images for marine oil spill detection. So far, detection and discrimination of oil spill and look-alike are still limited to the use of traditional machine learning algorithms and semantic segmentation deep learning models with limited accuracy. Thus, this study developed a novel deep learning oil spill detection model using computer vision instance segmentation Mask-Region-based Convolutional Neural Network (Mask R-CNN) model. The model training was conducted using transfer learning on the ResNet 101 on COCO as backbone in combination with Feature Pyramid Network (FPN) architecture for feature extraction at 30 epochs with 0.001 learning rate. Testing of the model was conducted using the least training and validation loss value on the withheld testing images. The model’s performance was evaluated using precision, recall, specificity, IoU, F1-measure and overall accuracy values. Ship detection and segmentation had the highest performance with overall accuracy of 98.3%. The model equally showed a higher accuracy for oil spill and look-alike detection and segmentation although oil spill detection outperformed look-alike with overall accuracy values of 96.6% and 91.0% respectively. The study concluded that the deep learning instance segmentation model performs better than conventional machine learning models and deep learning semantic segmentation models in detection and segmentation.