Remote Hyperspectral Imaging Acquisition and Characterization for Marine Litter Detection

Abstract

This paper addresses the development of a remote hyperspectral imaging system for detection and characterization of marine litter concentrations in an oceanic environment. The work performed in this paper is the following: (i) an in-situ characterization was conducted in an outdoor laboratory environment with the hyperspectral imaging system to obtain the spatial and spectral response of a batch of marine litter samples; (ii) a real dataset hyperspectral image acquisition was performed using manned and unmanned aerial platforms, of artificial targets composed of the material analyzed in the laboratory; (iii) comparison of the results (spatial and spectral response) obtained in laboratory conditions with the remote observation data acquired during the dataset flights; (iv) implementation of two different supervised machine learning methods, namely Random Forest (RF) and Support Vector Machines (SVM), for marine litter artificial target detection based on previous training. Obtained results show a marine litter automated detection capability with a 70–80% precision rate of detection in all three targets, compared to ground-truth pixels, as well as recall rates over 50%.