Marine Pollution Bulletin 188 (2023) 114651

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Marine Pollution Bulletin

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/marpolbul

Ocean oil spill detection from SAR images based on multi-channel deep
learning semantic segmentation
Rogelio Hasimoto-Beltran a, *, Mario Canul-Ku a, Guillermo M. Díaz Méndez b,
Francisco J. Ocampo-Torres c, Bernardo Esquivel-Trava b
a
Centro de Investigación en Matemáticas (CIMAT), Jalisco S/N, Col. Valenciana, Guanajuato 36023, Guanajuato, Mexico
b
Centro de Investigación Científica y de Educación Superior de Ensenada (CICESE), Carretera Ensenada - Tijuana No. 3918, Zona Playitas, Ensenada 22860, Baja
California, Mexico
c
CEMIE-Océano A. C, Ciudad Universitaria, C.U., Coyoacán, Ciudad de México 04510, Mexico

A R T I C L E I N F O A B S T R A C T

Keywords: One of the major threats to marine ecosystems is pollution, particularly, that associated with the offshore oil and
Oil spill detection gas industry. Oil spills occur in the world's oceans every day, either as large-scale spews from drilling-rig or
Deep learning tanker accidents, or as smaller discharges from all sorts of sea-going vessels. In order to contribute to the timely
SAR images
detection and monitoring of oil spills over the oceans, we propose a new Multi-channel Deep Neural Network (M-
Spatial filtering
DNN) segmentation model and a new and effective Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) image dataset, that enable us
to emit forewarnings in a prompt and reliable manner. Our proposed M-DNN is a pixel-level segmentation model
intended to improve previous DNN oil-spill detection models, by taking into account multiple input channels,
complex oil shapes at different scales (dimensions) and evolution in time, and look-alikes from low wind speed
conditions. Our methodology consists of the following components: 1) New Multi-channel SAR Image Database
Development; 2) Multi-Channel DNN Model based on U-net and ResNet; and 3) Multi-channel DNN Training and
Transfer Learning. Due to the lack of public oil spill databases guaranteeing a correct learning process of the M-
DNN, we developed our own database consisting of 16 ENVISAT-ASAR images acquired over the Gulf of Mexico
during the Deepwater Horizon (DWH) blowout, off the west coast of South Korea during the Hebei Spirit oil
tanker collision, and over the Black Sea. These images were pre-processed to create a 3-channel input image IM =
{IO, IW, IV}, to feed in and train our M-DNN. The first channel IO represents the radiometric values of the original
SAR Images, the second and third channels are derived from IO; in particular, IW represents the output of the wind
speed estimation using CMOD5 algorithm (Hersbach et al., 2003) and IV represents the variance of IO that in­
corporates texture information and at the same time encapsulates oil spill transition regions. IM channels were
split and linearly transformed for data augmentation (rotation and reflection) to obtain a total of 80,772 sub-
images of 224 × 224 pixels. From the entire database, 80 % of the sub-images were used in the DNN training
process, the remaining (20 %) was used for testing our final architecture. Our experimental results show higher
pixel-level classification accuracy when 2 or 3 channels are used in the M-DNN, reaching an accuracy of 98.56 %
(the highest score reported in the literature for DNN models). Additionally, our M-DNN model provides fast
training convergence rate (about 14 times better on the average than previous works), which proves the effec­
tiveness of our proposed method. According to our knowledge, our work is the first multi-channel DNN based
scheme for the classification of oil spills at different scales.

1. Introduction
Oil exploration and extraction are among the most important activ­
ities in the industrialized world and, unfortunately, historically repre­
sent a significant hazard to the ocean and coastal ecosystems. Tons of
crude oil have been (and still) dumped into the ocean by drilling plat­
forms, transport ships, and natural sources, causing severe damage to
marine life and economic development (Solberg, 2012). Two of the most
catastrophic oil spills over the oceans have occurred in the Gulf of
Mexico. The Deepwater Horizon (DWH) is known as the largest

* Corresponding author.
E-mail address: hasimoto@cimat.mx (R. Hasimoto-Beltran).

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.marpolbul.2023.114651
Received 26 August 2022; Received in revised form 9 January 2023; Accepted 20 January 2023
Available online 1 February 2023
0025-326X/© 2023 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
R. Hasimoto-Beltran et al.
accidental oil spill in history, wherein 594,000 tons of oil were dumped
into the U.S. Gulf Coast (from Texas to Florida) in 2010 (United States.
Coast Guard and National Response Team (US), 2011). The world's
second-worst oil spill occurred in Mexico's Ixtoc-1 well during June of
1979, located off the west coast of the Peninsula of Yucatan (south­
western the Gulf of Mexico). Ixtoc-1 rupture released 530,300 tons of oil
into the Bay of Campeche, where residues were washed ashore on
adjacent coasts, including U.S beaches in the northern part of the Gulf of
México (Jerneloev and Linden, 1981). More recently (October 2019)
and once again off the coast of Campeche (Southeast Gulf of México), the
Cayo Arcas maritime terminal suffered a blowout accident, causing a
discharge of ~89.87 tons of oil with an extension of 4484 ha (UNACAR,
2019; SEMAR, 2019). Chronic oil pollution in the ocean is more harmful
in the long term than a sole accidental oil spill (Soto et al., 2014).
Therefore, it is crucial to detect and monitor the extension of oil spills in
the early stage (whether by accidental or natural sources), in order to
emit a warning to corresponding authorities and take prompt actions to
mitigate severe ecological damage, that otherwise may take years or
decades for its recovery (Soto et al., 2014; Meyers, 2012).
Remote sensor technologies have become a valuable tool for
detecting and monitoring the extension and dynamics of ocean oil spills
at different scales, going from micro (natural sources, illegal ship
discharge, etc.) to large-scale spills (DWH). Different types of sensors
have been used for this purpose, for example laser fluorescence, optical
(visible spectrum), infrared (8–14 μm wavelengths), and microwave
sensors (Fingas and Brown, 2018). Laser fluorosensors are not for
deploying on satellites with sufficient resolution, and commonly they
are mounted on airplanes or ships (Solberg, 2012), therefore, the sea
surface coverage is limited. The optical and infrared sensors offer large
coverage of the Earth surface. However, they are passive sensors that
depend on the emitted electromagnetic radiation by the sun, so, they
cannot be used under cloudy and night conditions (Shamsudeen, 2020).
Nevertheless, under ideal weather conditions, the infrared sensors can
estimate the oil thickness better than microwave sensors.
The active microwave sensors, such as the Synthetic Aperture Radar
(SAR), have shown great ability to operate in all weather conditions,
both day and night, and at different spatial resolutions (meters), offering
more extensive coverage of the ocean. The presence of winds over the
sea surface generates capillary waves producing a certain roughness on
the surface that is responsible for the microwave pulse emitted by the
SAR being reflected in the sensor direction (backscatter). This roughness
is usually related, in the SAR images, to common wind waves without oil
or uncontaminated areas (Krestenitis et al., 2019). Surfactant films over
the ocean surface, such as oil, dampen the capillary waves (Leifer et al.,
2012), causing the absence of backscattering, resulting in black spots in
the SAR images. As easy as it may appear, oil detection by SAR is not an
easy task, the oil layer on the sea surface may be dispersed by the dy­
namics of the ocean and dissipated into the environment due to multiple
physical-chemical processes that modify its composition, such as evap­
oration, dispersion, emulsification, dissolution, oxidation, sedimenta­
tion, and bio-degradation (Kvočka et al., 2021). In this way, oil spills are
inherently dynamic, making their temporal observation rather difficult.
Fortunately, in most cases, the spill can be detected accurately in the
early stages (close to the source), and monitor its evolution, such as
coordinates location, extension, dispersion, mixing process, direction of
motion, etc. For this reason, it is important to continuously observe
those well-known oil-production platforms and oil transportation
permanently, particularly if micro or small-scale oil spills are frequent.
There are several methods for oil spill detection based on image
processing techniques (adaptive threshold), computer vision (segmen­
tation), and very recently Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) methods. The
popularity of DNNs methods is related to several factors, among the
most important are the increase in computing performance (high-end
CPUs and GPUs) and the availability of larger datasets (in particular
marine oil spills) that allows a robust training of complex models,
leading to high accuracy classification rates (Deng and Yu, 2014). DNNs
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Marine Pollution Bulletin 188 (2023) 114651
are the evolution of the Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs), which were
proposed in the 1950s. ANNs are based on the generalization of per­
ceptron concept, proposed by Rosenblatt (1958). Different than a human
brain structure wherein an external stimulus is processed by millions of
interconnected neurons (creating a unique processing unit) (Wang,
2003), an ANN is structured as stacked layers (one or two successive
layers). Each layer comprises a set of neurons which process data in­
formation as a mathematical operation or activation function (Chollet,
2021).
DNNs conversely, incorporate even hundreds of successive layers,
being able to solve very complex problems. Currently, DNNs incorporate
different types of layers and parameters that altogether define the model
to be trained for different purposes and applications, as for example,
YouTube Recommendations (Covington et al., 2016), Text ranking
(Severyn and Moschitti, 2015), 3D Archaeological artifacts classification
(Canul-Ku et al., Jan 2019), micro-fossils semantic segmentation (Hou
et al., 2021), image recognition (Simonyan and Zisserman, 2014), oil
spill segmentation (Zeng and Wang, 2020). One of the main problems is
that DNNs require large databases (in the order of millions of objects) for
the training phase (Soekhoe et al., 2016), which most of the time is
difficult to obtain, incurring in what is called overfitting (the model only
works for the source of data used during the training phase) (Glorot and
Bengio, 2010; LeCun et al., 2015).
A good alternative to avoid overfitting is Transfer Learning (TL)
scheme (Deng and Yu, 2014; Ng et al., 2015), in which a pre-trained
model from a (related) large-scale dataset is transferred to the new
problem by just tuning or adjusting the model with the new and much
smaller dataset in order to thousands of images, saving time and
computational resources. In our case, a general purpose DNN segmen­
tation model is transferred to the problem of oil spill classification (se­
mantic segmentation) by tuning-up or re-training the pre-defined large-
scale model with our smaller SAR image database. Another technique to
improve the generalization of DNN is data augmentation, this technique
consists in increase the number of images through linear trans­
formations, such as rotations and reflections (Zeng and Wang, 2020).
Unlike traditional schemes (image processing, computer vision, etc.),
DNNs can learn the best characteristics that discriminate and segment
oil slicks, independently of the complexity of the geometry and exten­
sion (Song et al., 2017). Because of this, DNNs have more robustness and
generalization ability (Wang et al., 2021) than traditional methods.
The use of SAR for the study of oil slicks dates back to the 80's, with
initial experiments on the interaction of microwaves and oil slicks
(Deloor, 1983; Johnson and Croswell, 1982; Kuilenburg, 1975). Subse­
quently, more advanced methodologies were proposed for the segmen­
tation and characterization of dark-spots associated with oil spills
through contrast enhancement, filtering process, texture analysis, sta­
tistical measures, etc. Some methods based on this approach are adap­
tive thresholds (Brekke and Solberg, 2005), features based on single-
polarization (Lang et al., 2017), dual-polarization (Velotto et al.,
2011; Kim and Jung, 2018) and quad-polarization (Li et al., 2018).
Adaptive thresholds methods compute statistics of image intensity in
order to obtain ideal thresholds to classify those pixels associated with
oil spills. Brekke et al. (Brekke and Solberg, 2005) compute a local
adaptive threshold based on the ratio σμ for each window around the
pixels in the SAR image; where σ and μ correspond to the variance and
average of pixels intensities into the window. The ratios are used to
define six homogeneity categories. Each category contains confidence
intervals and threshold value in decibels, which are used to compute the
adaptive threshold and consequently the pixel segmentation process.
Since Brekke's segmentation results are not sufficient to characterize
the oil slick completely, Lang et al. (2017) proposed additional features
to improve the segmentation performance. These features combine
radiometric, geometric, and texture information to build a feature vec­
tor, which characterizes a pixel as either oil spill or sea-water. A support
vector machine is applied after the segmentation step, where each
R. Hasimoto-Beltran et al.
feature vector is classified as oil or not oil pixel.
Velotto et al. (2011) use TerraSAR-X images to compute the complex
coherence measure based on the complex HH and VV scattering am­
plitudes. Complex coherence is then used to characterize pixels with the
presence of oil. Similar to Velotto et al., in the research of Kim and Jung
(2018), complex coherence, co-polarized phase difference (CPD) of HH
and VV polarizations, and VV texture information are used to build a
feature vector for each pixel of TerraSAR-X images, where the vectors
are classified through an ANN. Li et al. (2018) use quad-polarization
(HH, VV, HV, VH) of RadarSAT-2 to build ten SAR features to charac­
terize the pixels, and then apply a stacked auto-encoder as classifier.
Advanced methods based on DNN models have also been used for oil
spill detection on SAR images for prompt decision making. Yu et al.
(2018) propose a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) for oil spill
segmentation. The GAN models are represented by two DNNs which
compete during the training, the first DNN is known as generator, and
the second as discriminator (Goodfellow et al., 2020). The generator
corresponds to the DNN U-net (Ronneberger et al., 2015), and the
discriminator is a convolutional neural network used as regressor clas­
sifier. During the training, each DNN has an associated cost or loss
function. The authors propose the f-divergence as loss function to pro­
duce accurate oil spill pixel segmentation for SAR images, and make a
comparative analysis among five f-divergence functions. Their perfor­
mance results are based on a pair of independent images, and not over
the entire oil spill database they are based on.
Krestenitis et al. (2019) make a comparative analysis between six
DNNs to solve the task of semantic segmentation. The authors used five
classes to label each pixel of the images, which are related to regions
with presence of oil. The images were re-scaled to meet the resolution,
and split on patches of 320 × 320 pixels. The best results correspond to
the DNN U-net with DNN ResNet (He et al., 2015) as encoder or back­
bone, and 600 epochs.
Wang et al. (2021) propose re-use the AlexNet DNN to classify the
pixels as oil and not oil. The DNNs takes as input small cropped images
centered into pixel of interest. The interest pixels are selected from
Regions of Interest (RoIs) with presence of oil, and are labeled as oil and
not oil. The training process employs 2500 epochs and 17,100 cropped
images in total.
Li et al. (2021) propose a novel method based on GAN-DNN, similar
to Yu et al. (2018). The authors use a set of GAN-DNN, trained with n
multiscale images. During training, each generator and discriminator
process a single multiscale image, and the nth outputs are passed to the
next generator and discriminator, to be combined by a sum operation.
The sum operation is equal to the sum of residual neural network (He
et al., 2015), which improves the learning process of each generator and
discriminator. The DNN was trained with cropped images with size of
944 × 912, 352 × 404, 400 × 420, and 398 × 398 pixels related to
regions with presence of oil.
Zhu et al. (2022) proposed a novel DNN called Contextual and
Boundary-supervised Detection Network (CBD-Net). CBD-Net is based
on auto-encoder architecture, where the encoder component is a vari­
ation of ResNet (He et al., 2015), where each encoder block is followed
by an attention function. This function uses an average to compress the
spatial dimension of the encoder output. The authors propose the joint
loss function defined as the sum of the binary cross-entropy, the struc­
tural similarity index (SSIM) loss and the Dice coefficient loss.
Huang et al. (2022) propose a novel DNN method based on bounding
box regression for oil spill detection, which is different to our oil spill
segmentation task. In our case, we are able to classify the oil spill at a
pixel level and thus compute its extension area and precise location.
Another difference with our proposed scheme is that they do not directly
work with radiometric values of the SAR images, but with transformed
gray levels normalized between 0 and 255. Finally, a data augmentation
technique is applied to expand the number of samples to prevent over­
fitting. A comprehensive search remote sensing and machine learning
methods for oil spill detection and monitoring, is presented in
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Marine Pollution Bulletin 188 (2023) 114651
Shamsudeen (2020) and Al-Ruzouq et al. (2020).
Different than previous DNNs approaches for oil spill detection in the
literature, in this research we propose a Multichannel DNN (M-DNN)
model based on 3 input images or channels: original SAR image (IO),
derived variance (IV), and derived wind field map (IW). These three-
channel input improves significantly the performance of the oil-spill
classification rates at different scales or dimensions, such as small, me­
dium, and large-scale, including look-alikes. We are not aware of any
previous DNN model using the proposed variance and/or wind field as
input channels so far. Complementing this model, we propose a new
relatively large and diverse (it considers different oil spills scales) multi-
channel dataset that improves significantly the convergence speed of the
M-DNN the training phase. Furthermore, the Ground Truth (GT) is
carefully selected in which high mixture levels of oil-seawater are not
marked as oil in our labeling process, since they are most likely to be
confused with look-alikes (our interest is to detect the main oil-spill
stream).
The rest of the paper is organized as follows. The next section de­
scribes our DNN methodology including multichannel image formation,
database creation, and DNN training phase. Section 3 presents the
experimental results and comparison against state-of-the-art methodol­
ogies. Finally, conclusions of our work are presented in Section 4.
2. Methodology
Our proposed methodology is based on M-DNN and SAR-images of
the sea surface for the extraction or segmentation of oil slicks. It consists
of the following main steps (see Fig. 1): 1) A new Multi-channel SAR
Image Database Development; 2) M-DNN Model based on U-net and
ResNet; and 3) M-DNN Training and Transfer Learning. Broadly
speaking, we take the original radiometric SAR image and derive two
additional information channels (for a total of three channels) to be
processed by the M-DNN. The M-DNN output is a binary image (one-
output channel) wherein pixels related to continent, sea-water, drilling
platforms, ships, etc., have been filtered out, preserving only those pixels
related to oil slicks. Detail of each step is described in the next
subsections.
2.1. Multi-channel SAR Image Database Development
We developed an effective and reliable oil spill database that in­
corporates the following features: 1) a multi-channel SAR image infor­
mation in the presence of oil spills at different scales (small, medium,
and large-scale), geometries and textures; 2) SAR image global
normalization; and 3) Ground Truth construction and post-processing
(SAR image splitting and data augmentation). These features are
described next.
2.1.1. Multi-channel SAR Image Formation
Our new database was built using 16 full-resolution Envisat ASAR
images from the DWH (2010) (Wan and Cheng, 2013), off the Black Sea
coast (2005) (Akar et al., Dec 2011), and from the oil tanker Hebei Spirit
(2007) (Alpers et al., 2017), corresponding to 14-WSM and 2-IMP with
C-band and VV polarization, courtesy of the European Space Agency
(ESA) (see Table 1). SAR images store radiometric information of the
backscattered signal intensity, which is affected by the physics of the
reflectivity and the interference from the environment (such as speckle
noise). Using the Sentinel Application Platform (SNAP, https://step.esa.
int/main/toolboxes/snap/), SAR images were calibrated, multi-looked,
georeferenced, and their Normalized Radar Cross Section (NRCS)
σ 0 values converted to dB. From this set of pre-processed images, we
derived the corresponding variances and wind field maps to get our
proposed multi-channel input to the DNN IM = {IO, IW, IV}, where IO is
the original radiometric SAR image, IV and IW are the corresponding
Variance Filter (VF) and wind field images of IO, as shown in Fig. 2 and
explained next:
R. Hasimoto-Beltran et al. Marine Pollution Bulletin 188 (2023) 114651

Fig. 1. Oil spill segmentation pipeline based on U-net and ResNet DNNs: 1) Multi-channel SAR Image Database Development; 2) M-DNN Model based on U-net and
ResNet; and 3) M-DNN Training and Transfer Learning.

Table 1 IV (x, y) = σ 2V
Envisat ASAR images reported oil spills.
Date Type Date Type

2005-04-25 at 07:52:25 h IMP 2010-05-15 at 16:01 h WSM

2005-04-25 at 07:52:42 h IMP 2010-05-24 at 03:59 h WSM 1 ∑(WV − 1)/2 ∑(WV − 1)/2
2007-12-11 at 01:40 h WSM 2010-05-28 at 15:52 h WSM σ 2V = (IO (x − iy − j) − μ )2
WV2 i=− (WV − 1)/2 j=− (WV − 1)/2
2010-04-29 at 03:45 h WSM 2010-05-31 at 15:58 h WSM
2010-05-02 at 03:51 h WSM 2010-06-03 at 03:44 h WSM
2010-05-09 at 15:48 h WSM 2010-06-06 at 03:49 h WSM
2010-05-12 at 15:55 h WSM 2010-06-13 at 15:49 h WSM
2010-05-15 at 03:41 h WSM 2010-07-11 at 03:49 h WSM
V − 1)/2
(W∑ V − 1)/2
(W∑
1
μ= IO (x − iy − j)
WV2
– Variance Channel (IV): Variance filter behaves as an edge and texture i=− (WV − 1)/2 j=− (WV − 1)/2

detection (Fabijaśka, 2011), in particular it helps in highlighting

transition zones (statistical changes) normally associated with
seawater-oil interaction. VF is the computed variance of a local
where WV is the side length of a square local window, σ 2 the local in­
square window around the pixel IO(x, y), according to the following
tensity variance, and μ the local intensity average. After a careful
equations:
compromise between computation performance and edge extraction

-
(a) IO original image (b) IV variance image (c) IW wind speed image (d) Ground Truth
Fig. 2. Pre-processed images obtained from Envisat SAR Image acquired in 2010-04-29 to 03:45 h TC, which is associated with Deepwater Horizon oil spill event.
NaN values in image (c) are set to transparent.

4
R. Hasimoto-Beltran et al.
characteristics, the optimal WV is set to 9. A worth mentioning feature in
IV (Fig. 2b), is the capacity of the variance filter to emphasize high-
frequency mixing zones (seawater-oil transition) surrounding the oil
slick, providing additional information to the DNN model.
– Wind Speed Channel (IW): Sea surface roughness is fundamentally
driven by a complex interaction between the relative motion of the
wind field and the underlying ocean dynamics (eumetsat, 2020). In
the presence of surfactants, oil slicks for example, this air-sea inter­
action is affected and may result in a significant reduction of the
ocean roughness, depending on wind speed and oil thickness (Leifer
et al., 2012). If the wind speed is low to moderate, slicks are clearly
visible as dark areas against the otherwise homogeneous back­
ground. In contrast, if the wind speed is high, oil may be dispersed
and degraded into the ocean (Leifer et al., 2012). Due to this close
relationship between oil slicks and sea surface roughness, we pro­
posed the addition of the wind speed IW computed from the original
SAR image Io, as an additional input channel to our DNN model
(Fig. 2c). From each SAR scene, the wind speed was estimated
through the CMOD5 Geophysical Model Function (GMF) (Hersbach
et al., 2003), which relates the NRCS σ0 of a radiometrically cali­
brated image to the following variables: wind speed 10 m above the
sea surface U10, the incidence angle of the radar beam θi, the azimuth
angle between the SAR look-direction and the wind direction ϕ, for a
given radar co-polarization HH or VV.
The wind direction Udir was computed directly from the SAR image IO
by standard 2D Fourier analysis. Computed values were then compared
with the numerical results from the IOWAGA database (Rascle et al.,
2008; Rascle and Ardhuin, 2013). When the former did not match the
numerical results, the latter were preferred as input information to
derive the azimuth angle ϕ. In the case of the WSM images, with a pixel
size of 150 m by 150 m (after multilooking), the resolution of the wind
field (U10, Udir) was 900 m. Similarly, in the case of the IMP images, the
wind field resolution was 150 m. For an extended description on the
theoretical background of the CMOD5, please refer to Hersbach et al.
(2003) and Díaz Méndez et al. (2010).
2.1.2. SAR image global normalization
Since our DNN model requires image intensity values between [0,1]
(it accelerates training convergence (Wang et al., 2019)), we perform a
global normalization of the IO dataset before the training phase, as
opposed to image independent normalization applied in previous works
using DNNs. Global normalization keeps the same point of reference for
all images in the dataset, that is observing the ocean surface (seawater,
oil spills, look-alikes, etc.) with the same eyes. Normalizing every single
image independently, may create artificial errors of false image contrast,
that may confuse the DNN model. Under this case (independent
normalization), every image is stretched out in different degrees
creating “perhaps” look-alike regions or pixels, producing significant
classification errors.
For global image normalization, we compute the global minimum
(Min) of the IO dataset (usually negative in the presence of oil spills), and
add it up to the same dataset (Io − Min). The new dataset has now a
minimum value of 0. We now search for the global maximum (Max), and
compute Io/Max; now the range of IO dataset is [0,1]. This operation
ensures that all images are stretched out in the same rate or point of
reference. The image variance IV is computed after the normalization
process.
2.1.3. Ground Truth (GT) construction and post-processing
Once images have been normalized, the oil spill GT was created
based on Wan and Cheng (2013), Akar et al. (2011) and Alpers et al.
(2017) dataset information. We have been very careful on this process
by hand-labeling (as GT) those areas confirmed as oil and well correlated
with low variance and low wind speed magnitudes surrounded by a high
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Marine Pollution Bulletin 188 (2023) 114651
variance and high wind speed edges (see Fig. 2b and d). Our interest is to
detect the main oil-spill stream in its early stages, capable of inhibiting
the formation of capillary waves (roughness) at wind speeds approxi­
mately between 3 and 7 m s− 1 (Brekke and Solberg, 2005). Weathered
oil spills on the other side, have been spread and dispersed over the
ocean by the action of a physical phenomenon (wind, turbulence, waves,
etc.), showing high mixture levels of oil-seawater and consequently
higher values of variance. These mixtures zones are not taken into ac­
count as oil spills in the GT. In addition, our dataset was carefully
designed to include oil spills with different geometries and scales (large,
medium, and small-scale including natural discharges), as shown in
Fig. 3. This is to deliver the best classification of dark spots, either as oil
or not oil (continent, seawater, look-alike, etc.).
In order to fit the actual dimensions of the multi-channel components
into our DNN model, we split the original IM and GT set into sub-images
or patches Pk ∈ IM and Bk ∈ GT respectively. A total of 42,892 patches Pk
were obtained with dimensions w × h, where w = 224 ≪ IMx and h = 224
≪ IMy (see Fig. 4), where (IMx, IMy) represent the original size of the full
resolution SAR images (IO). Additionally, in order to increase the num­
ber of sub-images associated with oil spill and to balance to number of
oil and not-oil pixels in our database, we apply data augmentation to
those Pk patches holding more than 10 % of pixels labeled as oil. Data
augmentation includes random rotation, horizontal and vertical re­
flections according to Zeng and Wang (2020). For each selected patch,
we produce a total of 20 additional sub-images or patches (considering
the three channels patches Pk plus the GT patch Bk), in this way the
resulting augmented dataset reaches 80,772 patches, which corresponds
to our final experimental dataset.
2.2. Multi-Channel DNN model based on U-net and ResNet
Oil spills in the ocean have complex geometries and associated non-
uniform sea-surface roughness, driven by the ocean-atmosphere inter­
action. Because of this, DNNs are excellent tools for solving this kind of
problems. The main disadvantage of DNN models is the large amount of
data required (in the order of million of objects or images) to be hand
labeled and passed through the training process. In order to overcome
this task and being able to use a relatively small oil-spill dataset, we
make use of a pre-trained network called U-net (Ronneberger et al.,
2015).
The U-net is one of the most used DNN for different segmentation
problems offering high accuracy results. U-net is based on auto-encoder
architecture which has two components: the Encoder and Decoder, each
component is composed by four blocks (see Fig. 5). Each Encoder's block
performs the feature extraction process of the input patch Pk, producing
(l− 1) l
two feature vectors r ∈ R n/(2 ) and x ∈ R n/(2 ) , where l ∈ {1, 2, 3, 4}
l l
is the block number and n (=224 * 224 * 3) is the dimension of the input
patch Pk for l = 1. xl goes through the remaining Encoder's blocks, and rl
is used later in the Decoder process as shown in Fig. 5. These feature
vectors represent the main characteristics that identify the multi-
channel image, it is pretty much like a trained compression algorithm
that learn how to encapsulate the main representation of the input image
(raw data). Each encoder's block consists of the following layers as
shown in Fig. 6: two convolutional layers, one REctified Linear Unit
(ReLU) layer, and max pooling layer.
The convolution layers process the input patch with 2m convolu­
tional filters of dimension 3 × 3 × m, where m is the depth of the filter
applied for the extraction of prominent image features. The corre­
sponding output is then fed into the ReLU layer. The Relu layer elimi­
nates those values close to cero to prevent potential numerical problems
in future processing, either training or classification process (Glorot
et al., 2011). The max pooling layer also known as down-sampling layer,
reduces the length of the primitive feature vector rl by a factor of 2. This
process is repeated for the rest of the remaining blocks to have a final
down-sampling factor of 16 in both coordinate axes.
R. Hasimoto-Beltran et al.
Original SAR images (Gulf of México)
Large Scale Mid-scale
Image Area: 154,051 Km2 Image area: 39,964 Km2
(a) Large (b) Middle
Fig. 3. Different oil spills scales (dimensions) included in our dataset.
Fig. 4. Patches dataset creation from multi-channel image for oil spill segmentation.
U-net Encoder has been modified to include an additional process at
the end of each block, called residual block (He et al., 2015). The pur­
pose of this block is both to avoid the problem of vanishing gradient
(Pascanu et al., 2012) that occurs in the optimization process during
training, and to gain additional accuracy of deeper than deep neural
networks. Thanks to this groundbreaking architecture called ResNet, it
is possible to train even thousands of layers effectively. ResNet residual
block is aimed at learning the distribution error of the input feature
vector xl, which is modeled as follow:
zl = h(xl ) + R(xl , Wl )
xl+1 = max(0, zl )
where h(xl) is the identity mapping function, R(xl, Wl) is the residual
function or residual block with parameter Wl, and xl, xl+1 are the input
and output vector of l-th residual block (He et al., 2015).
The Decoder on the other side, performs the Encoder's inverse
6
Marine Pollution Bulletin 188 (2023) 114651
Small-scale
Image area: 18,397 Km2
(c) Small
process. It takes as input the Encoder's feature vector x4 and produces a
weighted image u1, wherein oil related features have been emphasized.
During this process, x4 is upsampled and concatenated with the corre­
sponding rl vector in each independent block (Fig. 5).
Finally, u1 is transformed by a sigmoid activation function Fk = σ(u1)
that assigns a probability measure to every element in u1, that guaran­
tees the output Fk is between 0 and 1. Finally, Fk is binarized by using a
predefined threshold (experimentally set to 0.6), in which oil pixels are
set 1 if B
̂k ≃ Bk .
2.3. Multi-channel DNN training and transfer learning
Since a DNN is a supervised method, it requires both the input Pk ∈ IM
and corresponding Ground Truth (Bk ∈ GT) for the learning or training
process. Therefore, DNN is a mapping process that associates IM to GT,
such that GT
̂ ≃ GT, represented as DNN:IM → GT. ̂ The GT image corre­
sponds to a binary image where all pixels have been manually associated
to oil or not-oil (sea-water, continent, drilling platform, etc.) using
previous knowledge of the spill.
The training phase consists of an iterative optimization process
aimed at finding the best DNN weights for an optimal data classification,
that is the segmentation of oil spills at a pixel-level. The optimization
method is based on the gradient-descent Adam algorithm (Kingma and
R. Hasimoto-Beltran et al.
Fig. 5. General diagram of U-net + ResNet DNN.
Fig. 6. U-net encoder block.
Ba, 2014) and a cost function evaluated at the end of each iteration, that
work close together to find the best convolutional filters (in the Encoder
and Decoder) and residual blocks parameters Wl that conform the DNN
layers (see Section 2.2). The cost function computes the error between
the GT and GT̂ and based on this result all DNN weights are updated
until a predefine number of iterations (epochs) is met.
The original U-net Encoder weights to be used in our DNN model
have been pre-trained with ImageNet Large-scale Visual Recognition
Challenge (Russakovsky et al., 2015), which consists of 1.4 million of
RGB images with dimension 224 × 224 splitted into 1000 classes. On the
other hand, the U-net decoder-block was re-trained (fined tuned) using
our 3-channel augmented dataset (IM), to teach the DNN how to properly
solve our oil pixel classification problem, this is called TL.
3. Experiments and results
3.1. DNN settings
Our experimental setup is aimed at investigating the effectiveness of
different input-channel combinations for the problem of oil-spill clas­
sification. Each channel combination requires separate training of the
DNN (U-net + ResNet) and their own statistical performance metrics in
order to obtain the most effective combination for oil classification.
Channel combinations were set as follows: 1) IO = {IO}, 2) Iw = {IW}, 3)
Iv = {IV}, 4) Iov = {IO, IV}, 5) Iow = {IO, IW}, Iwv = {IO, Iv} and 6) Iovw = {IO,
IV, IW}. Each full resolution image channel is split into sub-images of
dimension w × h = 224 × 224, following U-net constraints. To get the
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Marine Pollution Bulletin 188 (2023) 114651
best model, we make use of Adam algorithm (Kingma and Ba, 2014) as
the optimizer to update the weights using 100 iterations, α = 0.0001 as
learning rate, and batch size of 128 to the training process. We randomly
split the experimental dataset into three subsets: a training set (80 %), a
test set (20 %), and a cross-validation (20 %) set extracted from the
training set itself to evaluate if the network is learning correctly without
overfitting. From the test set we get global statistics such as the mean,
variance and confidence intervals to evaluate the effectiveness of our
proposed method. Binary cross-entropy function is used as loss function
in the training step, defined as follows:
1∑n ∑ ( )
loss = − B(xy)k log F(xy)k
n k=1 (xy)∈{1,…,w}×{1,..,h}
where n is the total number of patches in training dataset, B(x, y) is the
Ground Truth, and F(x, y) is the predicted pixel of the DNN (U-net).
Our DNN code implementation is written in Python programming
language, using a pre-trained ResNet34 backbone model (34 encoding
blocks) from the Segmentation Model Repository described in Yaku­
bovskiy (2019), and Keras framework (Chollet et al., 2015) for the
optimization process during DNN fine-tuning. The network training was
performed on an Intel Xeon Silver 4214 CPU, 128 GB RAM with an
NVIDIA Titan RTX 24 GB GPU.
3.2. Evaluation
To evaluate the effectiveness of our proposed method we make use of
both the Ground Truth B ∈ GT and the predicted B ̂ ∈ GT
̂ subimages. The
predicted subimage corresponds to oil spill segmentation output of the
trained DNN model. The evaluation of our DNN model is computed at
patch level and considers the correct segmentation of oil versus sea-
water and continent. We choose the classification ACCuracy (ACC)
(Tsoumakas and Katakis, 2007; Elkan, 2012), the Intersection over
Union (IoU) or Jaccard index (Rahman and Wang, 2016; Niwattanakul
et al., 2013), and the F1_score (Goutte and Gaussier, 2005) as the
R. Hasimoto-Beltran et al. Marine Pollution Bulletin 188 (2023) 114651

performance metrics defined as: Table 2

Channel combination comparison in terms of ACC, IoU and F1-score metrics (%).
Combination ACC (oil IoU (oil and ACC-Oil IoU -Oil F1-oil
TP + TN and not oil) not oil)
ACC = ;
TP + TN + FP + FN Io 97.35 ± 94.85 ± 91.98 ± 88.25 ± 95.25
0.98 1.85 1.85 4.11
Iw 96.11 ± 92.53 ± 87.05 ± 82.88 ± 92.40
1.85 3.39 2.28 7.79
Iv 78.90 ± 65.22 ± 4.72 ± 4.67 ± 8.97
TP 5.10 6.96 5.14 4.40
IoU = ; Iov 98.41 ± 96.88 ± 94.82 ± 92.47 ± 96.68
FP + TP + FN
0.88 1.70 1.70 4.67
Iow 98.56 ± 97.17 ± 97.30 ± 93.55 ± 98.23
0.68 1.31 0.89 2.86
Iwv 97.91 ± 95.90 ± 94.61 ± 90.84 ± 96.66
1.00 1.91 1.30 4.18
precision • recall
F1 score = 2 • ; Iowv 98.54 ± 97.12 ± 96.26 ± 93.44 ± 97.68
precision + recall 0.70 1.36 1.36 2.85
TP
precision = ;
TP + FP
using the two-channel combination Iow (ACC = 0.9856, IoU = 0.9717,
TP
recall = ; and F1-score = 98.24 %), and very close behind are Iowv and Iov in terms
TP + FN
of ACC metric. The use of the variance channel by itself does not make
sense (very small values in all accuracy metrics.
are obtained for oil pixel detection), the DNN may find the most
where TP is number of pixels that were correctly classified as oil (true prominent edges but still needs the intensity values of each region from
positive), TN is number of pixels that were correctly classified as not oil, the original SAR image. Iw gets better results but still below the multi­
FP is the false positive value, that is the number of pixels that were channel inputs Iov, Iow, and Iovw by as much as 7 %–10 % and 4 %–5 % for
classified incorrectly as oil, and FN is the number of pixels that were ACC-Oil and IoU-Oil respectively. It appears that Iv and Iw provide
classified at not oil incorrectly. All these values are computed at a pixel- similar information (when Io is included) regarding to oil spill classifi­
level using the corresponding pair of binary sub-images B and B. ̂ ACC cation. In the analysis of the true pixel-label (oil, not-oil) against pre­
and IoU represent the average over all binary patches in the testing dicted pixel-label (DNN classified pixel), Io gets the lowest oil pixel
dataset, which are computed with their respective confidence interval as classification performance of 91.98 % (8.02 % oil-pixel misclassifica­
a statistical proof of our method. The F1-score is used to evaluate binary tion), compared to 97.30 % for the Iow channel (2.7 % oil-pixel
classification systems, and combines the precision and recall of the misclassification), for a total improvement of 5.32 %. The rest of
model. precision measures the quality of the model in the classification channel combinations also provide good results as in the case of Iow.
task (how many of the positive predictions made by the model were Based on these results, we can see that 2 or 3-channel combination
correct), while the recall is how many of the positive samples (oil pixels provide better segmentation performance than a sole channel Io, which
in this case) present in the dataset were correctly identified by the confirms that wind speed and variance information are useful variables
model. Therefore, F1-score is a harmonic mean of the model's precision to highlight those pixels associated to oil slicks when working with
and recall. To further assess the effectiveness of our pixel-level classifi­ radiometric SAR images.
cation method, we also present the confusion matrix (also called con­ A visual analysis of the segmentation results for all multi-channel
tingency table) as evaluation criteria of our classifier. Given the number combinations is shown in Fig. 8. The first and second rows correspond
of classes C in a particular classifier, the confusion matrix is represented to the original SAR images and corresponding ground truth, in which the
by C × C matrix describing the percentage of correct and incorrect pixels on white color represent the oil spill, and black color pixels are
predictions made by the classifier compared to the actual labels on the associated to not-oil, that is sea water, continent, drilling platforms,
test set. Since we provide a binary classification of oil spills, our ships, etc.). In most cases, Iow gets the best visual combination, which is
confusion matrix is represented by a 2 × 2 matrix of correct oil and not confirmed by the corresponding ACC and IoU values.
oil predictions. The confusion matrix represents the average accuracy We now compared our oil classification results against similar DNN
over all patches in the testing set: based state-of-the-art methods in the literature as shown in Tables 3 and
4. A comparative analysis of the dataset size in Table 3, shows that our
dataset is one of the largest in the literature for the oil-detection problem
using DNN (Deep Neural Networks) with 80,772 multichannel images
1∑ C
with dimension 224 × 224. In Table 4 we show the performance com­
ACC = ACCi
L i=1 parison of the different models based on ACC and IoU metrics. Our
proposed multichannel Iow model gets the highest scores in both global
(ACC and IoU) and per-class (ACC-Oil and IoU-Oil) classification accu­
racies. In particular, for ACC we are on average 1 % higher than (Wang
where ACCi is the accuracy of each patch and L is the number of patches
et al., 2021; Yu et al., 2018; Li et al., 2021), and 23 % higher on average
in B.
̂ A correct classification means that the learned model predicts the
than (Krestenitis et al., 2019; Zhu et al., 2022). None of the authors in
same class as the original class of the test case.
the comparative analysis report ACC-Oil (represented by NR—not re­
A comparison of the ACC, IoU, and F1-score (obtained from the
ported), and only one reports IoU-Oil (Krestenitis et al., 2019), which is
confusion matrices) metrics for the proposed method are summarized
40 % far below our reported value. It would have been interesting if
Table 2 and Fig. 7 (confusion matrices). Looking at Io classification
those authors we compare with, had reported the confusion matrices as
performance standalone, it detects quite well the absence or low-levels
well. Our performance results are statistically more trustable and stable
of ocean roughness associated to oil spill with an ACC = 97.35%, IoU
than other authors.
= 94.85 %, and F1-score = 95.41 %. The best performance was obtained
We have shown that our methodology is well suited to detect oil

8
R. Hasimoto-Beltran et al.
(a)
(c)
(e)
(g)
Fig. 7. Confusion matrices for each channel combination of our dataset.
patches; however, it is also important to determine its capacity to
discriminate between oil and look-alike patches, which is a key chal­
lenge in oil spill detection. In the next experiment, we make use of a
publicly available dataset used in Krestenitis et al. (2019), for additional
comparative analysis with the same labeled dataset. This dataset in­
cludes original SAR images and corresponding ground truth classified as
continent, oil, look-alike, and seawater, but there are important flaws: a)
Original images are in JPEG format, which is a compression algorithm
9
Marine Pollution Bulletin 188 (2023) 114651
(b)
(d)
(f)
for which, some information has already been removed; b) We need
original SAR radiometric values, otherwise we are not able to compute
the wind field maps from JPEG images (not clear what additional pro­
cessing the Krestenitis' dataset went through to be in the range [0,1]); c)
Images have been rescaled (expanded or shorten) to meet the resolution
of 1250 × 650, which severely affects variance computation. Isolated
white or black pixels are widened during image expansion or interpo­
lation, introducing artifacts that affect the performance of our DNN; and
R. Hasimoto-Beltran et al. Marine Pollution Bulletin 188 (2023) 114651

Table 4
Comparative analysis of our proposed multi-channel classification model against
most relevant state-of-the-art methods in the literature (%). Highest accuracy
values are represented in bold.
Authors Method ACC IoU ACC-oil IoU-oil Epochs
(oil, (oil, (iterations)
not- not-
oil) oil)

Yu et al. SAR/GAN 97.62 NR NR NR 4000

(2018)
Krestenitis SAR/U- NR 64.97 NR 53.79 600
et al. net +
(2019) ResNet
Wang et al. RGB/ 97.49 NR NR NR 2500
(2021) AlexNet
Li et al. SAR/ 97.60 NR NR NR 100
(2021) GAN/
Multiscale
Zhu et al. SAR/CBD- NR 83.42 NR NR 80
(2022) Net/
Multiscale
Ours (Iow) SAR/U- 98.56 97.17 97.30 93.55 100
net +
ResNet/
Multi-
channel
Average improvement 1 23 – 39.8 14×

using one and two channels (original SAR image and its corresponding
variance), obtaining the following performance results shown in
Table 5. It can be observed that our DNN model is on the average 3.43 %
and 55.0 % better in classifying oil and look-alikes respectively. Look-
alikes are detected with high accuracy (Io = 97.50 % and Iov = 97.93
%) by our model, because their coverage area is larger than the one
related to oil spills in the dataset (the variance channel in our model is
less affected by larger look-alikes), as shown in Table 5. On the contrary,
oil spills in the dataset are represented in their majority by small surfaces
that, as mentioned before, their ground truths are out of phase from the
original location, affecting significantly the overall accuracy of the
classification, as shown in Fig. 9. Red represents a look-alike, blue is the
ground truth, and yellow is the oil spill classification result of our DNN
model. It can be seen, the ground truth provided by Krestenitis et al.
(2019) is misplaced with respect to the real oil spill location. Despite
Fig. 8. Qualitative results obtained from a sample of Envisat SAR Images and these errors in the dataset, our results show much better performance
the multi-channel combinations of our dataset.
accuracy in the classification of both oil spills and look-alikes using the
original SAR image and corresponding variance.
As a final experiment, we have included a pair of Sentinel1-A SAR
Table 3
Number of images of our proposed multi-channel classification model against image acquired in 2022-03-07 at 00:15:51 h UTC and 2022-04-12 at
most relevant state-of-the-art methods in the literature. 00:15:52 h UTC from the Gulf of México, with potential (unconfirmed)
oil spills. These images delineate oil streaks at different resolution (20
Authors Total number of Image Approximate total number
images (training and size of images of size (224 ×
m), scales, and patterns to those present in our database, and conse­
testing phases) 224) quently were not considered in the training process. As shown in Fig. 10,
our scheme detects the corresponding SAR anomalies at a pixel level
Yu et al. 43 256 × 98
(2018) 256 quite well using Iow component. There is a clear correlation between
Krestenitis 1112 1250 × 17,792 these two images (Io and Iw), wherein Iw represents an image enhance­
et al. (2019) 650 ment of Io, that produces an increase in both classification performance
Wang et al. 18,810 300 × 48,906
and visual appearance.
(2021) 300
Li et al. (2021) 30 256 × 68
256
Zhu et al. 8070 256 × 9223 Table 5
(2022) 256 Comparative analysis of our DNN model against Krestenitis et al. (2019), using
Ours (Iow) 80,772 224 × 80,772 their own developed dataset (%).
224
Author IoU-Oil IoU-look- Percentage of improvement wrt [11] (oil,
alike look-alike)
d) In the majority of the dataset, the ground truth is wrong and Krestenitis 53.79 55.40 –
considerably misplaced (out of phase) from the real or original image et al.
scenario, affecting the final performance values. Despite all these (2019)
Ours IO 57.13 97.50 (3.34, 42.10)
problems, we did use Krestenitis' dataset to retrained our DNN model
IOV 54.27 97.93 (0.48, 42.53)

10
R. Hasimoto-Beltran et al.
(a) SAR image.
Fig. 9. Dataset characteristics.
(a) 2022-03-07 (b)
(c) 2022-04-12 (d)
4. Conclusions
Space-borne SAR is a very useful remote sensing technology to detect
and monitor oil spills in the ocean surface, providing large area coverage
with high spatial resolution. Several automatic methodologies have
been proposed for the segmentation of oil spills from SAR images;
however, most of them do not work with full-resolution imagery nor
automatic semantic segmentation of oil and look-alikes by means of
DNNs. Based on these aspects, the main contribution of this work is both
the use of a multi-channel DNN model (that includes original SAR image
and derived variance and wind field maps) and the proposal of a new
and carefully design dataset that takes into account different oil spill
geometries, texture and scales, providing high-accuracy image classifi­
cation values at a pixel level. Specifically, texture information of the oil
spill, seawater and look-alikes is introduced through a variance filter
which delineates or outlines the oil spill transition regions along the
wind speed as an additional channel. The dataset is expanded using data
augmentation, allowing the construction of a large and balanced dataset
(oil and not oil regions) which in turn, reduces over-fitting of the DNN
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Marine Pollution Bulletin 188 (2023) 114651
(b) Overlaping of GT and DNN segmentaon
into SAR image.
Fig. 10. Sentinel-1A SAR sub-images of Campeche
Sound, southwestern Gulf of Mexico, rst row contains
a sub-image acquired in 2022-03-07 to 00:15:51 h
UTC has coordinates 19◦ 36′ 06.0′′ N, 92◦ 19′ 22.3′′ W
(upper left corner of quadrant), 19◦ 14′ 32.4′′ N,
91◦ 57′ 48.7′′ W (lower right corner of quadrant).
Second row shows a sub-image has acquired in 2022-
04-12 to 00:15:52 h UTC with coordinates
20◦ 07′ 18.1′′ N 94◦ 07′ 11.1′′ W (upper left corner of
quadrant), 19◦ 45′ 44.5′′ N 93◦ 45′ 37.6′′ W (lower right
corner of quadrant).
segmentaon
segmentaon
during the training process. The Intersection over Union (IoU) and Ac­
curacy (ACC) performance values reached averages of 97.17 % and
98.56 % respectively for our proposed multi-channel component Iow,
representing the highest scores reported in the literature. We demon­
strated that our proposed multi-channel DNN methodology along with
our dataset is better than using only one channel (original SAR images),
providing a better data generalization for oil spill segmentation with
excellent accuracy. Our future work is aimed at different paths: a)
improving the performance of our DNN model by dynamically adapting
the optimization step size during the training process; b) automatic
channel weighting (currently all channels in our model have the same
weight); that is the DNN should be able to detect which channel is more
important in the classification process; c) Detecting the type of oil and
thickness using additional multispectral information.
CRediT authorship contribution statement
Rogelio Hasimoto-Beltran: Contributed to the main ideas of the
research proposal and responsible of research activity planning.
R. Hasimoto-Beltran et al.
Mario Canul-Ku: Research activity planning and Implementation of
the computational techniques for data analysis and image database.
Guillermo M. Díaz Méndez: Responsible for the computation of the
wind field maps and acquisition of the financial support for the project
leading to this publication.
Francisco J. Ocampo-Torres: Co-responsible of wind field map
interpretation.
Bernardo Esquivel-Trava: Co-responsible of wind field map
interpretation.
Declaration of competing interest
The authors declare that they have no known competing financial
interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence
the work reported in this paper.
Data availability
Data will be made available on request.
Acknowledgment
This research has been funded by the Mexican National Council for
Science and Technology (CONACyT) - Mexican Ministry of Energy -
Hydrocarbon Fund, project 201441: Implementation of networks of
ocean observations (physical, geochemical, ecological) to generate
scenarios upon possible contingencies related to the exploration and
production of hydrocarbon in deep sea waters in the Gulf of Mexico. This
is a contribution of the Gulf of Mexico Research Consortium (CIGoM).
Authors wish to acknowledge PEMEX's specific request to the Hydro­
carbon Fund to address the environmental effects of oil spills in the Gulf
of Mexico. Access to Envisat and Sentinel-1 imagery has been kindly
granted by the European Space Centre. Authors also would like to
acknowledge CONACYT's support through the “Consorcio de Inteli­
gencia Artificial” under Project 296737 and to the “Laboratorio Nacio­
nal de Supercómputo del Bajío” under Project 300832.
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