Identification of Marine Oil Spills Using Neural Network Technologies

Abstract

Introduction. Detecting oil spills is a critical task in monitoring the marine ecosystem, protecting it, and minimizing the consequences of emergency situations. The development of fast and accurate methods for detecting and mapping oil spills at sea is essential for prompt assessment and response to emergencies. High-resolution aerial photography provides researchers with a tool for remote monitoring of water discoloration. Artificial intelligence technologies contribute to improving and automating the interpretation and analysis of such images. This study aims to develop approaches for identifying oil spilled on water surfaces using neural networks and machine learning techniques.

Materials and Methods. Algorithms capable of automatically identifying marine oil spills were developed using computer image analysis and machine learning methods. The U-Net convolutional neural network was employed for image segmentation tasks. The neural network architecture was designed using the PyTorch library implemented in Python. The AdamW optimizer was chosen for training the network. The neural network was trained on a dataset comprising 8,700 images.

Results. The performance of oil spill detection on water surfaces was evaluated using metrics such as IoU, Precision, Recall, Accuracy, and F1 score. Calculations based on these metrics demonstrated identification accuracy of approximately 83–88%, confirming the efficiency of the algorithms used.

Discussion and Conclusion. The U-Net convolutional network was successfully trained and demonstrated high accuracy in detecting marine oil spills on the given dataset. Future work will focus on developing algorithms using more advanced neural network models and image augmentation methods.