Oil spill detection and mapping (OSPM) is an extremely relevant issue from a scientific point of view due to the environmental impact on coastal and marine ecosystems. In this study, we present a new approach to assess scientific literature for the past 50 years. In this sense, our study aims to perform a bibliometric and network analysis using a literature review on the application of OSPM to assess researchers and trends in this field of science. In methodological terms we used the Scopus base to search for articles in the literature, then we used bibliometric tools to access information and reveal quantifying patterns in this field of literature. Our results suggest that the detection of oil in the sea has undergone a great evolution in the last decades and there is a strong relationship between the technological evolution aimed at detection with the improvement of remote sensing data acquisition methods. The most relevant contributions in this field of science involved countries such as China, the United States, and Canada. We revealed aspects of great importance and interest in OSPM literature using a bibliometric and network approach to give a clear overview of this field’s research trends.
A set of open-source routines capable of identifying possible oil-like spills based on two random forest classifiers were developed and tested with a Sentinel-1 SAR image dataset. The first random forest model is an ocean SAR image classifier where the labeling inputs were oil spills, biological films, rain cells, low wind regions, clean sea surface, ships, and terrain. The second one was a SAR image oil detector named “Radar Image Oil Spill Seeker (RIOSS)”, which classified oil-like targets. An optimized feature space to serve as input to such classification models, both in terms of variance and computational efficiency, was developed. It involved an extensive search from 42 image attribute definitions based on their correlations and classifier-based importance estimative. This number included statistics, shape, fractal geometry, texture, and gradient-based attributes. Mixed adaptive thresholding was performed to calculate some of the features studied, returning consistent dark spot segmentation results. The selected attributes were also related to the imaged phenomena’s physical aspects. This process helped us apply the attributes to a random forest, increasing our algorithm’s accuracy up to 90% and its ability to generate even more reliable results.
Oil spill detection and mapping using deep learning (OSDMDL) is crucial for assessing its impact on coastal and marine ecosystems. A novel approach was employed in this study to evaluate the scientific literature in this field through bibliometric analysis and literature review. The Scopus database was used to evaluate the relevant scientific literature in this field, followed by a bibliometric analysis to extract additional information, such as architecture type, country collaboration, and most cited papers. The findings highlight significant advancements in oil detection at sea, with a strong correlation between technological evolution in detection methods and improved remote sensing data acquisition. Multilayer perceptrons (MLP) emerged as the most prominent neural network architecture in 11 studies, followed by a convolutional neural network (CNN) in 5 studies. U-Net, DeepLabv3+, and fully convolutional network (FCN) were each used in three studies, demonstrating their relative significance too. The analysis provides insights into collaboration, interdisciplinarity, and research methodology and contributes to the development of more effective policies, strategies, and technologies for mitigating the environmental impact of oil spills in OSDMDL.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.