A Synthetic Data-Driven Approach for Oil Spill Detection: Fine-Tuning YOLOv11-Seg with LIC-Based Ocean Flow Modeling

Oil spills represent a severe environmental hazard, threatening marine and coastal ecosystems, biodiversity, and socio-economic stability. Timely and accurate detection of such incidents is critical for mitigating their ecological and economic consequences. Conventional detection techniques, including manual inspection and satellite-based observation, remain limited by high operational costs, temporal delays, and restricted spatial coverage. To overcome these limitations, this study introduces a comprehensive computer vision framework that addresses two core challenges: (i) the construction of a large-scale, high-quality synthetic oil spill dataset through mask extraction and seamless blending of oil spill regions with diverse oceanic backgrounds, and (ii) the development of a fine-tuned YOLOv11m-seg detection model trained on this enriched dataset. To further enhance the realism and spatial distinctiveness of oil spill textures, the Line Integral Convolution (LIC) is applied to estimate and visualize ocean surface flow patterns, generating coherent streamline textures that simulate the natural diffusion and transport of oil in water. The model exhibited strong generalization and precision, achieving a training accuracy exceeding IoU@0.50-0.95 to 85% over 50 epochs. Evaluation metrics confirmed its reliability, with an F1 score of 94%, precision of 94%, and recall (mAP@0.50) of 94%. These results demonstrate that the developed approach not only enhances dataset diversity but also substantially improves the accuracy and representativeness of real-time oil spill detection in marine environments.