# Benchmarking Deep Learning Models for Dense Event Classification of Offshore Wind Infrastructure in Sentinel-1 Time Series

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.04706 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.04706/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 11 of its 57 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 5 Aug 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 11 of 11)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [SGDR: Stochastic Gradient Descent with Warm Restarts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.03983/) (2016)
- [RoFormer: Enhanced Transformer with Rotary Position Embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.09864/) (2021)
- [Deep learning for time series classification: a review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.04356/) (2018)
- [Lightweight, Pre-trained Transformers for Remote Sensing Timeseries](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.14065/) (2023)
- [Self-attention for raw optical Satellite Time Series Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10536/) (2019)
- [Offshore oil and gas platform dynamics in the North Sea, Gulf of Mexico, and Persian Gulf: Exploiting the Sentinel-1 archive](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.19801/) (2026)
- [Global Offshore Wind Infrastructure: Deployment and Operational Dynamics from Dense Sentinel-1 Time Series](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.20822/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Monitoring of offshore wind energy infrastructure life cycles, especially during the deployment phase, is an important contribution for stakeholders to make informed decisions in a phase of increasing deployment activities. ESA's Sentinel-1 Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) mission produces large data archives that enable the global monitoring of offshore wind infrastructure. Turning these high-volume archives into information requires algorithms that automatically extract single event labels from dense time series at a global scale. In this study, we present a structured comparison of ten deep learning model-training variants for the dense classification of Sentinel-1 based offshore wind infrastructure time series, aiming to advance rule-based event classification of this task. We trained LSTM, Transformer, and fully connected model variants with monotemporal, unidirectional, and bidirectional context awareness, each with and without self-supervised pretraining. Among these, the supervised BiLSTM performs best, raising the target AUC score from 0.7853 for the rule-based baseline to 0.8509, and the perfect match rate from 0.3508 to 0.5063. Combining the BiLSTM predictions with the existing baseline labels in a label-transition-minimising ensemble further improves agreement with the test data. Using these improved labels, we isolate the deployment phase of individual turbines at a global scale and conduct a regional and subregional analysis covering 2016-01-01 to 2025-03-31, reporting median deployment durations of 84 d (China), 242 d (EU), and 258 d (UK). Deployment-related drivers, including legal regulations such as subsidies, and environmental conditions, emerge clearly from the analysed results across multiple spatial scales.