Using Multispectral UAV Imagery for Marine Debris Detection in Sri Lanka

Marine pollution is a significant issue in Sri Lanka, with the country being a major contributor to marine debris. Marine pollution has the potential to adversely impact marine and coastal biodiversity, as well as the fishing and tourism industries. Current methods for monitoring marine debris involve labor-intensive approaches, such as visual surveys conducted from boats or aircraft, beach clean-ups, and underwater transects by divers. However, an emerging trend in many countries is the use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) imagery for monitoring marine debris due to its advantages, including reduced labour requirements, higher spatial resolution, and cost-effectiveness. The work presented in this study utilizes multispectral UAV imagery to monitor marine debris in a coastal area of Ambalangoda, Sri Lanka. For the automated detection of marine debris in captured images, this work replicates the state-of-the-art CutPaste method for region detection and utilized the ResNet-18 model with Faster R-CNN for the final classification of marine debris instances. The implemented approach demonstrated a classification accuracy of approximately 60% in automatic marine debris detection, laying the groundwork for potential enhancements in the future.