Mask R-CNN based automated identification and extraction of oil well sites

Fine-scale land disturbances due to mining development modify the land surface cover and have cumulative detrimental impacts on the environment. Understanding the distribution of fine-scale land disturbances related to mining activities, such as oil well sites, in mining regions is of vital importance to sustainable mining development. For efficient mapping, automated identification and extraction of the oil well sites using high-resolution satellite images are required. In this work, we proposed the Oil Well Site extraction (OWS) Mask R-CNN based on the original Mask R-CNN (Region-based Convolutional Neural Networks), to accurately extract well sites using multi-sensor remote sensing images. For improvement of mapping efficiency, two modifications were made to Mask R-CNN: (1) replacing the backbone of Mask R-CNN with D-LinkNet, and (2) adding a semantic segmentation branch to Mask R-CNN to force the whole network to focus on the relationship between line objects and oil well sites. As imagery data were from multiple sensors (RapidEye 2/3 and WorldView 3), a pre-trained Residual Channel Attention Network (RCAN) was applied to super-resolve the images with different resolutions. Several key spatial features, such as nearby roads and area size, have also been used in the oil well site mapping process. The experimental results indicate that our OWS Mask R-CNN considerably improves the average precision (AP) and the F1 score of Mask R-CNN from 51.26% and 25.7% to 60.93% and 61.59%, respectively.