Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?
Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of Graph Search.
Detecting and quantifying marine pollution and macroplastics is an increasingly pressing ecological issue that directly impacts ecology and human health. Here, remote sensing can provide reliable estimates of plastic pollution by regularly monitoring and detecting marine debris in coastal areas. In this work, we present a detector for marine debris built on a deep segmentation model that outputs a probability for marine debris at the pixel level. We train this detector with a combination of annotated datasets of marine debris and evaluate it on specifically selected test sites where it is highly probable that plastic pollution is present in the detected marine debris. We integrate data-centric artificial intelligence principles by devising a training strategy with extensive sampling of negative examples and an automated label refinement of coarse hand labels. This yields a deep learning model that achieves higher accuracies on benchmark comparisons than existing detection models trained on previous datasets.
Florian Frédéric Vincent Breider, Thibault Béranger Masset, Lu Zhou
Devis Tuia, Marc Conrad Russwurm, Elif Dilge Gül
Florian Frédéric Vincent Breider, Sylvain Coudret