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Assessment of marine litter through remote sensing: recent approaches and future goals
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This review classified remote sensing approaches for detecting marine litter — including satellite, aircraft, and drone platforms with optical, infrared, and radar sensors — finding that few studies had reached operational status and that detecting small or submerged litter remains a major technical challenge.
This bibliographic review provides an overview of techniques used to detect marine litter using remote sensing. The review classified studies in terms of platform (satellite, aircrafts, drones), sensors (passive or active), spectral (visible, infrared, microwaves), spatial resolution (<1 to >30 m), type and size (macroplastics, microplastics), or classification methodology (sighting, photointerpretation, supervised). Most studies applied satellite information to address marine litter using multi- and hyper- spectral optical sensors. The correspondence analysis on analyzed variables exhibited that aircrafts with high spatial resolution (<3 m) with optical sensors (λ = 400 to 2500 nm) seem to be the most optimum combination to target marine litter, while satellites carrying Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) sensors (λ = 3.1 to 5.6 cm) may detect sea-slicks associated to surfactants that might contain high concentration of microplastics. Gaps indicate that future goals in marine litter detection should be addressed with platforms including optical and SAR sensors.
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Detection of exogenous floating marine debris: an overview of techniques associated with remote sensing
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This review surveyed remote sensing techniques for detecting floating marine debris including plastic litter, identifying current capabilities, limitations, and research gaps. The paper calls for development of a spectral reference library for marine debris to improve detection accuracy from satellite and aerial platforms.
On advances, challenges and potentials of remote sensing image analysis in marine debris and suspected plastics monitoring
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This review evaluates the current state of satellite and aerial remote sensing for detecting marine plastic debris, noting that while progress has been made using optical and hyperspectral imaging, significant challenges remain including low detection resolution for small particles, confusion with other floating materials, and the need for better machine learning algorithms. The paper is relevant to the microplastics field as large-scale monitoring tools are needed to track plastic pollution distribution and inform cleanup and policy efforts, though direct detection of microplastics (<5 mm) from orbit remains largely out of reach with current technology.
Plastic Litter Project 2018: a feasibility study on detecting plastics in the aquatic environment using drones and satellite images
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Researchers tested whether drone and satellite imagery could detect floating plastic litter in the ocean, using large artificial plastic targets made of PET bottles, plastic bags, and nylon fishing nets. While drones could detect the targets, satellite resolution was insufficient at the tested target size, highlighting current limitations of remote sensing for marine plastic litter monitoring.
Emerging Technologies for Remote Sensing of Floating and Submerged Plastic Litter
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This review evaluates emerging remote sensing technologies for detecting floating and submerged plastic litter in marine environments, including LiDAR, thermal infrared, radar, and multi-angle polarimetry. Researchers found that no single technology can detect all types of marine plastic under all conditions, and that combining multiple sensing approaches offers the best results. The study proposes a common vocabulary across disciplines and calls for more research on how different plastics interact with detection signals.
An Estimation Method of Coastal Ocean Debris Using Aerial Drone
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This study developed a drone-based aerial estimation method for detecting and quantifying coastal ocean debris, including plastic litter. The approach used aerial imagery analysis to address limitations of traditional survey methods for large-scale marine litter assessment.
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When a large batch of papers lands in the Atlas, we read through it and send a short write-up of what stood out.