Automatic detection of ship-induced cloud features in satellite imagery

Abstract

Ships crossing the ocean are known to produce long, curvilinear features called ship tracks visible in satellite imagery via the Twomey effect; however, there has been little exploitation of satellite imagery for broad atmospheric studies or global monitoring of ship emissions due to the difficulty of automated ship track detection. Prior studies are either proof-of-concept, qualitatively assessed, or restricted to a certain time of day. We propose a statistical method for the automated identification of ship tracks and demonstrate using GOES-West ABI data. We first present a human-assisted segmentation method, which we use to generate a ground truth data set of 529 annotated ship tracks in GOES-West ABI products. We then describe a two-stage automated approach comprising a detection stage to generate ship track proposals and a classification stage to reduce false positives. For detection, we present a novel pipeline based around a z-score filtering technique, and for classification, we demonstrate several classifiers from literature. In a final experiment, we quantitatively tune the detection parameters and train the classifier using the ground truth dataset, then test on a sequestered set of images; the detect-then-classify system had an overall Pd of 0.68 and 0.80 for daytime and nighttime data, respectively, and the classifier reduced false positive detections by 67% and 75%.