Comparison of CNNs and Vision Transformers-Based Hybrid Models Using Gradient Profile Loss for Classification of Oil Spills in SAR Images

Oil spillage over a sea or ocean surface is a threat to marine and coastal ecosystems. Spaceborne synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data have been used efficiently for the detection of oil spills due to their operational capability in all-day all-weather conditions. The problem is often modeled as a semantic segmentation task. The images need to be segmented into multiple regions of interest such as sea surface, oil spill, lookalikes, ships, and land. Training of a classifier for this task is particularly challenging since there is an inherent class imbalance. In this work, we train a convolutional neural network (CNN) with multiple feature extractors for pixel-wise classification and introduce a new loss function, namely, "gradient profile" (GP) loss, which is in fact the constituent of the more generic spatial profile loss proposed for image translation problems. For the purpose of training, testing, and performance evaluation, we use a publicly available dataset with selected oil spill events verified by the European Maritime Safety Agency (EMSA). The results obtained show that the proposed CNN trained with a combination of GP, Jaccard, and focal loss functions can detect oil spills with an intersection over union (IoU) value of 63.95%. The IoU value for sea surface, lookalikes, ships, and land class is 96.00%, 60.87%, 74.61%, and 96.80%, respectively. The mean intersection over union (mIoU) value for all the classes is 78.45%, which accounts for a 13% improvement over the state of the art for this dataset. Moreover, we provide extensive ablation on different convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and vision transformers (ViTs)-based hybrid models to demonstrate the effectiveness of adding GP loss as an additional loss function for training. Results show that GP loss significantly improves the mIoU and F-1 scores for CNNs as well as ViTs-based hybrid models. GP loss turns out to be a promising loss function in the context of deep learning with SAR images.