Airborne sensors for detecting large marine debris at sea

The human eye is an excellent, general-purpose airborne sensor for detecting marine debris larger than 10 cm on or near the surface of the water. Coupled with the human brain, it can adjust for light conditions and sea-surface roughness, track persistence, differentiate color and texture, detect change in movement, and combine all of the available information to detect and identify marine debris. Matching this performance with computers and sensors is difficult at best. However, there are distinct advantages over the human eye and brain that sensors and computers can offer such as the ability to use finer spectral resolution, to work outside the spectral range of human vision, to control the illumination, to process the information in ways unavailable to the human vision system, to provide a more objective and reproducible result, to operate from unmanned aircraft, and to provide a permanent record that can be used for later analysis.

Research highlights
► Airborne remote sensors can effectively detect marine debris.
► Multispectral imagery with image processing is an effective, low-cost option.
► A small unmanned aircraft is an effective, low-cost platform for digital imagery.
► Additional sensors, like lidar, increase performance as well as cost and complexity.