OIL SPILL DETECTION IN CALM OCEAN CONDITIONS: A U-NET MODEL NOVEL SOLUTION

Oil spills severely damage marine life and coastal environments. To reduce their polluting effect on the ecosystem, it is important to promptly react to potential spills for early detection and monitoring. In this paper, we propose a drone-based solution with a deep-learning U-net model. It processes the radar backscattering dominated by the specular component in calm ocean conditions to detect contaminated sea surfaces with oil spills. Results show that our approach achieves a high detection rate exceeding 90% for thick oil slicks in the range of 1-10 mm.