A SLIC-KMeans-GJO Method for Oil Spill Detection in Marine Radar Image

Oil slicks pose a severe threat to marine ecosystems, making accurate and real-time detection increasingly urgent. Marine X-band radar has become an essential tool for oil slick monitoring due to its high temporal resolution and its ability to sensitively capture the damping of capillary waves on the sea surface caused by oil films. Building upon this, an unsupervised and lightweight SLIC-KMeans-GJO detection framework is proposed. The method first generates superpixels by using Simple Linear Iterative Clustering (SLIC) and then applies K-means clustering to extract region of interest (ROI). An improved Golden Jackal Optimizer (GJO) is adaptively initialized based on the grayscale distribution and information entropy. To enhance optimization performance, Lévy flight and stochastic perturbation mechanisms are incorporated to improve global exploration and local convergence precision. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method significantly outperforms conventional thresholding approaches and other intelligent optimization-based segmentation algorithms in terms of noise suppression, target identification accuracy, and discrimination precision for oil slick targets. It effectively mitigates over-segmentation and false detections while preserving fine edge details and the true spatial extent of oil slicks. The proposed framework offers a novel and practical solution for real-time oil slick monitoring, holding strong potential for operational maritime emergency response.