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Multi-Scale Hierarchical Attention Ensemble Network for Fine-Grained Riverine Waste Segmentation Using UAV Multispectral Imagery
Summary
Researchers used a drone with a special five-band camera to fly over a river in Indonesia and trained an AI system to automatically spot and map plastic waste floating in the water, even distinguishing it from natural debris like leaves and branches. This matters because rivers are a major pathway for plastic to reach oceans and break down into microplastics, which can end up in our food and water; better, faster detection tools like this could help communities target cleanup efforts before waste spreads further. The study is an early proof-of-concept from one river during one season, so more testing is needed before it can be used widely.
Riverine plastic waste is difficult to detect and map accurately because debris ranges from small items to large floating clusters, and tropical rivers present challenging conditions, such as murky water, floating vegetation, and variable lighting. This study develops and benchmarks a deep learning method for pixel-level, multi-scale mapping of riverine waste from five-band UAV multispectral imagery. We deployed a drone equipped with a five-band multispectral sensor over the Brantas River in Surabaya, East Java, Indonesia, and introduce the Multi-Scale Hierarchical Attention Ensemble (MHAE), which combines three backbone networks across three image resolutions through learned scale- and backbone-attention weighting. MHAE was evaluated against 12 CNN-, transformer-, state-space-, and traditional-machine-learning-based baselines (including Random Forest, U-Net, UNet++, and DeepLabV3+) on the accompanying BrantasRiverWaste-UAV dataset (882 image tiles from a single-site, single-season orthomosaic covering approximately 0.54 km2 of river surface, labelled as water, land, organic waste, or inorganic waste), with pairwise comparisons assessed using Wilcoxon signed-rank tests with Bonferroni correction. MHAE achieved the highest pixel-level waste detection rate among the 12 evaluated models (86.76%), with a mean intersection-over-union of 78.33% (third-highest, behind UNet++ and U-Net). This work provides an initial, single-site benchmark and reference architecture for near-real-time riverine waste monitoring, and introduces the BrantasRiverWaste-UAV as, to our knowledge, one of the first five-band multispectral UAV datasets for tropical riverine waste mapping. Balanced sampling and multi-scale attention fusion can substantially improve waste-pixel detection under severe class imbalance; because the benchmark derives from a single site and season, future work should extend evaluation across additional seasons and river systems before the approach is generalised operationally.