TransOilSeg: A Novel SAR Oil Spill Detection Method Addressing Data Limitations and Look-Alike Confusions

Marine oil spills pose significant threats to ecosystems and human health, emphasizing the importance of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images for reliable and all-weather monitoring. However, current methods face two major challenges. The first is data limitations, including insufficient data quantity and noise, such as speckle noise and distortions introduced during preprocessing. The second is look-alike confusions, which pose challenges in distinguishing oil spills from visually similar phenomena. This article introduces TransOilSeg, a novel method designed to address these challenges and enhance oil spill detection performance. TransOilSeg employs a transfer learning component (TLC) to integrate data from diverse geographical regions and varying quality, learning general features from multisource datasets. By leveraging a gradient aggregation algorithm, the model combines features from limited and noisy SAR oil spill (SOS) datasets, transferring data deficiencies. In addition, the adaptive attention hybrid encoder (AAHE) analyzes contextual features and adapts to varying datasets, enabling the model to effectively distinguish oil spills from look-alike phenomena. Comprehensive evaluations across multiple datasets demonstrate the robust generalization capability of TransOilSeg. On the M4D dataset, which includes 1002 training samples, the model achieved a mean intersection over union (mIoU) of 61.38% for oil spill detection and 62.41% for look-alike detection. Furthermore, TransOilSeg maintained strong performance when transferred between datasets with varying levels of noise and distortions, demonstrating its adaptability to challenging conditions. These results highlight its potential as a reliable tool for marine oil spill detection and monitoring.