Our society relies heavily on plastic products, and the amount of plastic waste is expected to increase in the future. If not properly discarded or recycled, much of it accumulates in rivers and lakes. Eventually, it will flow into the oceans, where it can form aggregations of marine debris together with natural materials like driftwood and algae.

A new study from Wageningen University and EPFL researchers, recently published in iScience, has developed an artificial intelligence-based detector that estimates the probability of marine debris shown in satellite images. This could help to systematically remove plastic litter from the oceans with ships.

Searching through satellite images with AI

Accumulations of marine debris are visible in freely available Sentinel-2 satellite images that capture coastal areas every 2–5 days worldwide on land masses and coastal areas. Because these amount to terabytes of data, the data needs to be analyzed automatically through artificial intelligence models like deep neural networks.

Marc Rußwurm, Assistant Professor at Wageningen University, says, "These models learn from examples provided by oceanographers and remote sensing specialists, who visually identified several thousand instances of marine debris in satellite images on locations across the globe. In this way, they 'trained' the model to recognize plastic debris."