Big Plastic Masses Detection using Sentinel 2 Images
This addresses marine litter detection for environmental monitoring, but it is incremental as it builds on existing satellite and neural network methods.
The researchers tackled detecting large plastic masses in oceans using Sentinel 2 satellite images, achieving better results by applying neural networks to all thirteen frequency bands compared to remote sensing differential indexes.
This communication describes a preliminary research on detection of big masses of plastic (marine litter) on the oceans and seas using EO (Earth Observation) satellite systems. Free images from the Sentinel 2 (Copernicus Project) platform are used. To develop a plastic recognizer, we start with an image where we can find a big accumulation of "nonfloating" plastic: Almería greenhouses. We made a test using remote sensing differential indexes, but we got much better results using all available wavelengths (thirteen frequency bands) and applying Neural Networks to that feature vector.