LRA-UNet: A Lightweight Residual Attention Network for SAR Marine Oil Spill Detection

Oil spills represent a serious threat to marine ecosystems. Remote sensing monitoring, especially based on synthetic aperture radar (SAR), have been extensively employed in marine environments due to its unique advantages. However, SAR images of marine oil spills exhibit challenges of weak boundarie...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Yu Cai, Jingjing Su, Jun Song, Dekai Xu, Liankang Zhang, Gaoyuan Shen
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: MDPI AG 2025-06-01
Series:Journal of Marine Science and Engineering
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Online Access:https://www.mdpi.com/2077-1312/13/6/1161
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Summary:Oil spills represent a serious threat to marine ecosystems. Remote sensing monitoring, especially based on synthetic aperture radar (SAR), have been extensively employed in marine environments due to its unique advantages. However, SAR images of marine oil spills exhibit challenges of weak boundaries, confusion with look-alike phenomena, and the difficulty of detecting small-scale targets. To address these issues, we propose LRA-UNet, a Lightweight Residual Attention UNet for semantic segmentation in SAR images. Our model integrates depthwise separable convolutions to reduce feature redundancy and computational cost, while adopting a residual encoder enhanced with the Simple Attention Module (SimAM) to improve the precise extraction of target features. Additionally, we design a joint loss function that incorporates Sobel-based edge information, emphasizing boundary features during training to enhance edge sharpness. Experimental results show that LRA-UNet achieves superior segmentation results, with a mIoU of 67.36%, surpassing the original UNet by 4.41%, and a 5.17% improvement in IoU for the oil spill category. These results confirm the effectiveness of our approach in accurately extracting oil spill regions from complex SAR imagery.
ISSN:2077-1312