SRCNet: Seminal Representation Collaborative Network for Marine Oil Spill Segmentation

Effective oil spill segmentation in Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) images is critical for marine oil pollution cleanup, and proper image representation is helpful for accurate image segmentation. In this paper, we propose an effective oil spill image segmentation network named SRCNet by leveraging SAR image representation and the training for oil spill segmentation simultaneously. Specifically, our proposed segmentation network is constructed with a pair of deep neural nets with the collaboration of the seminal representation that describes SAR images, where one deep neural net is the generative net which strives to produce oil spill segmentation maps, and the other is the discriminative net which trys its best to distinguish between the produced and the true segmentations, and they thus built a two-player game. Particularly, the seminal representation exploited in our proposed SRCNet originates from SAR imagery, modelling with the internal characteristics of SAR images. Thus, in the training process, the collaborated seminal representation empowers the mapped generative net to produce accurate oil spill segmentation maps efficiently with small amount of training data, promoting the discriminative net reaching its optimal solution at a fast speed. Therefore, our proposed SRCNet operates effective oil spill segmentation in an economical and efficient manner. Additionally, to increase the segmentation capability of the proposed segmentation network in terms of accurately delineating oil spill details in SAR images, a regularisation term that penalises the segmentation loss is devised. This encourages our proposed SRCNet for accurately segmenting oil spill areas from SAR images. Empirical experimental evaluations from different metrics validate the effectiveness of our proposed SRCNet for oil spill image segmentation.