Automated marine oil spill detection algorithm based on single-image generative adversarial network and YOLO-v8 under small samples

As marine resources and transportation develop, oil spill incidents are increasing, endangering marine ecosystems and human lives. Rapidly and accurately identifying marine oil spill is of utmost importance in protecting marine ecosystems. Marine oil spill detection methods based on deep learning and computer vision have the great potential significantly enhance detection efficiency and accuracy, but their performance is often limited by the scarcity of real oil spill samples, posing a challenging to train a precise detection model. This study introduces a detection method specifically designed for scenarios with limited sample sizes. First, the small sample dataset of marine oil spill taken by Landsat-8 satellite is used as the training set. Then, a single image generative adversarial network (SinGAN) capable of training with a single oil spill image is constructed for expanding the dataset, generating diverse marine oil spill samples with different shapes. Second, a YOLO-v8 model is pretrained via the method of transfer learning and then trained with dataset before and after augmentation separately for real-time and efficient oil spill detection. Experimental results have demonstrated that the YOLO-v8 model, trained on an expanded dataset, exhibits notable enhancements in recall, precision, and average precision, with improvements of 12.3 %, 6.3 %, and 11.3 % respectively, compared to the unexpanded dataset. It reveals that our marine oil spill detection model based on YOLO-v8 exhibits leading or comparable performance in terms of recall, precision, and AP metrics. The data augmentation technique based on SinGAN contributes to the performance of other popular object detection algorithms as well. •5000 OLI images are collected from Landsat-8, labeled oil spills through visual interpretation and environmental data.•A SinGAN framework trained from a single image is utilized to capture the multi-scale texture information of the oil spill.•A YOLO-v8 detection framework is trained on original and generated data to achieve a high level of detection accuracy.•The data augmentation technique based on SinGAN contributes to the performance of other detection algorithms as well.