GSCAT-UNET: Enhanced U-Net model with spatial-channel attention gate and three-level attention for oil spill detection using SAR data.

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Marine pollution due to oil spills presents major risks to coastal areas and aquatic life, leading to serious environmental health concerns. Oil Spill detection using SAR data has transitioned from traditional segmentation to a variety of machine learning & deep learning models like UNET proving its efficiency for the task. This research paper proposes a GSCAT-UNET model for efficient oil spill detection and discrimination from lookalikes. The GSCAT-UNET is an advanced UNET architecture comprising of Spatial-Channel Attention Gates(SCAG), Three Level Attention Module(TLM) and Global Feature Module(GFM) for global level oil spill feature enhancement leading to effective oil spill detection and discrimination from lookalikes. Sentinel-1 Dual-Pol SAR dataset of 1112 images and respective labeled images (5 classes) including confirmed oil spills and lookalikes is used to demonstrate the efficacy of the GSCAT-UNET model. The GSCAT-UNET model significantly enhances segmentation accuracy and robustness for oil spill detection with 5% higher accuracy and 29% higher IoU i.e. 93.7% compared to the UNET segmentation model, addressing the challenges of SAR data complexities and imbalanced datasets. The strong performance of the GSCAT-UNET model demonstrates its potential as a critical tool for disaster response and environmental monitoring.