Robust Small Methane Plume Segmentation in Satellite Imagery
This addresses the challenge of automated methane monitoring for environmental applications, with incremental improvements in sensitivity for small plumes.
The paper tackled the problem of detecting small methane plumes in satellite imagery to aid climate change mitigation, achieving a 78.39% F1-score and detecting plumes as small as 400 m².
This paper tackles the challenging problem of detecting methane plumes, a potent greenhouse gas, using Sentinel-2 imagery. This contributes to the mitigation of rapid climate change. We propose a novel deep learning solution based on U-Net with a ResNet34 encoder, integrating dual spectral enhancement techniques (Varon ratio and Sanchez regression) to optimise input features for heightened sensitivity. A key achievement is the ability to detect small plumes down to 400 m2 (i.e., for a single pixel at 20 m resolution), surpassing traditional methods limited to larger plumes. Experiments show our approach achieves a 78.39% F1-score on the validation set, demonstrating superior performance in sensitivity and precision over existing remote sensing techniques for automated methane monitoring, especially for small plumes.