Improved Lightweight Marine Oil Spill Detection Using the YOLOv8 Algorithm

Marine oil spill detection using Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) is crucial but challenged by dynamic marine conditions, diverse spill scales, and limitations in existing algorithms regarding model size and real-time performance. To address these challenges, we propose LSFE-YOLO, a YOLOv8s-optimized (You Only Look Once version 8) lightweight model with an original, domain-tailored synergistic integration of FasterNet, GN-LSC Head (GroupNorm Lightweight Shared Convolution Head), and C2f_MBE (C2f Mobile Bottleneck Enhanced). FasterNet serves as the backbone (25% neck width reduction), leveraging partial convolution (PConv) to minimize memory access and redundant computations—overcoming traditional lightweight backbones’ high memory overhead—laying the foundation for real-time deployment while preserving feature extraction. The proposed GN-LSC Head replaces YOLOv8’s decoupled head: its shared convolutions reduce parameter redundancy by approximately 40%, and GroupNorm (Group Normalization) ensures stable accuracy under edge computing’s small-batch constraints, outperforming BatchNorm (Batch Normalization) in resource-limited scenarios. The C2f_MBE module integrates EffectiveSE (Effective Squeeze and Excitation)-optimized MBConv (Mobile Inverted Bottleneck Convolution) into C2f: MBConv’s inverted-residual design enhances multi-scale feature capture, while lightweight EffectiveSE strengthens discriminative oil spill features without extra computation, addressing the original C2f’s scale variability insufficiency. Additionally, an SE (Squeeze and Excitation) attention mechanism embedded upstream of SPPF (Spatial Pyramid Pooling Fast) suppresses background interference (e.g., waves, biological oil films), synergizing with FasterNet and C2f_MBE to form a cascaded feature optimization pipeline that refines representations throughout the model. Experimental results show that LSFE-YOLO improves mAP (mean Average Precision) by 1.3% and F1 score by 1.7% over YOLOv8s, while achieving substantial reductions in model size (81.9%), parameter count (82.9%), and computational cost (84.2%), alongside a 20 FPS (Frames Per Second) increase in detection speed. LSFE-YOLO offers an efficient and effective solution for real-time marine oil spill detection.