Deep neural network for oil spill detection using Sentinel-1 data: application to Egyptian coastal regions

Building an oil spill segmentation model is very challenging because of the limited available information on oil spill accidents. Therefore, this paper proposes a custom data generator based on Segmentation Network (Seg-Net) model implemented in Conditional Generative Adversarial Network (CGAN). The proposed model is trained for oil spill segmentation using 50 Sentinal-1 Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) images. The proposed model employs a modified Seg-Net as a generator to produce high-quality oil spills' images and a Patch-GAN as discriminator. This architecture results in a significant improvement of the final oil segmentation results, in comparison with Seg-Net model, while using relatively small training dataset. For performance assessment, the paper presents the oil spills segmentation results of four suggested models using Sentinel-1 SAR images. The presented models are U-Net, Seg-Net, CGAN, and a Seg-Net-based CGAN the performance assessment reveals that the proposed model produces oil spill segmentation images with an average accuracy of 99.04%, Intersection over Union (IoU) index of 96.59%, and a precision of 85.24%. In addition, the training time required for the proposed model is 3 h 20 min per 50 epochs, while it is nearly 10 h and 55 min for training a CGAN model.