Beyond Segmentation: An Oil Spill Change Detection Framework Using Synthetic SAR Imagery

TL;DR

This paper introduces a change detection framework for oil spill monitoring using synthetic pre-spill SAR images generated by the TAHI model, significantly reducing false positives and enhancing detection reliability.

Contribution

It proposes the OSCD task and the TAHI framework to generate synthetic pre-spill images, enabling effective change detection without real pre-spill data, and establishes a new benchmark dataset.

Findings

OSCD outperforms traditional segmentation methods in accuracy.

Synthetic pre-spill images improve change detection reliability.

The TAHI framework effectively generates realistic pre-spill SAR images.

Abstract

Marine oil spills are urgent environmental hazards that demand rapid and reliable detection to minimise ecological and economic damage. While Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) imagery has become a key tool for large-scale oil spill monitoring, most existing detection methods rely on deep learning-based segmentation applied to single SAR images. These static approaches struggle to distinguish true oil spills from visually similar oceanic features (e.g., biogenic slicks or low-wind zones), leading to high false positive rates and limited generalizability, especially under data-scarce conditions. To overcome these limitations, we introduce Oil Spill Change Detection (OSCD), a new bi-temporal task that focuses on identifying changes between pre- and post-spill SAR images. As real co-registered pre-spill imagery is not always available, we propose the Temporal-Aware Hybrid Inpainting (TAHI) framework, which generates synthetic pre-spill images from post-spill SAR data. TAHI integrates two key components: High-Fidelity Hybrid Inpainting for oil-free reconstruction, and Temporal Realism Enhancement for radiometric and sea-state consistency. Using TAHI, we construct the first OSCD dataset and benchmark several state-of-the-art change detection models. Results show that OSCD significantly reduces false positives and improves detection accuracy compared to conventional segmentation, demonstrating the value of temporally-aware methods for reliable, scalable oil spill monitoring in real-world scenarios.