Toward Near-Real-Time Marine Oil Spill Detection in SAR Imagery using Quantum-Assisted SVM

TL;DR

This paper presents a quantum-assisted SVM approach for rapid marine oil spill detection in SAR imagery, achieving comparable accuracy to classical methods with improved inference efficiency.

Contribution

It introduces a novel quantum-assisted ensemble method optimized with quantum annealing for efficient, near-real-time oil spill detection in satellite imagery.

Findings

Achieved IoU of 0.60 and accuracy of 0.89 on Sentinel-1 data

Quantum annealing offers superior inference efficiency over gate-based quantum computing

Demonstrated transferability to geographically distinct oil spill images

Abstract

Marine oil spills require rapid detection to mitigate severe ecological and economic damage. While satellite-based Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) provides essential all-weather monitoring, analyzing this data remains challenging. Deep learning models often require massive datasets and incur high latency. To address this, a pixel-wise quantum-assisted Support Vector Machine (QSVM) bagging ensemble is developed. Quantum annealing is leveraged to optimize the support vectors of individual weak SVMs on small data subsets, which are then classically aggregated. The approach is evaluated on Sentinel-1 imagery using both quantum simulation and physical quantum annealing hardware. The quantum-assisted pipeline achieved performance comparable to a rigorous classical baseline, yielding an Intersection-over-Union (IoU) of 0.60 and a balanced accuracy of 0.89. Complementary experiments with gate-based quantum computing demonstrated similar segmentation accuracy, although the annealing approach offered superior inference efficiency. Generalization was further assessed on independent oil spill imagery from the Strait of Hormuz, demonstrating the potential transferability of the trained pipeline to geographically distinct spill events. These results establish the feasibility of quantum-assisted, segmentation pipelines for near-real-time environmental monitoring.