An Assessment of YOLO Architectures for Oil Tank Detection from SPOT Imagery

Since it can be used to manage and estimate oil reserves, the inventory of oil tanks is essential for both the economy and the military applications. Considering oil tanks contain valuable materials required for transportation and industrial production, they are a significant type of target. Oil tank detection techniques have several uses, including monitoring disasters, preventing oil leaks, designing cities, and assessing damage. Huge amount of satellite imagery has recently been available and it is used in both the military and civil applications. The new spaceborne sensors' higher resolution enables the detection of targeted objects. Therefore, remote sensing instruments provide ideal tools for oil tank detection task. Conventional approaches for oil tank detection from high resolution remote sensing imagery generally relies on geometric shape, structure, contract differences and color information of the boundary or hand-crafted features. However, these methods come along with vulnerabilities and hence it can be challenging to obtain accurate detection in the presence of a number of disturbance elements, particularly a wide range of colours, size variations, and the shadows that view angle and illumination create. Therefore, deep learning-based methods can provide a big advantage for solution of this task. In this regard, this study employs four YOLO models namely YOLOv5, YOLOX, YOLOv6 and YOLOv7 for oil tank detection from high-resolution optical imagery. Our results show that YOLOv7 and YOLOv5 architectures provide more accurate detections with mean average precision values of 68.11% and 69.69%, respectively. The experiments and visual inspections reveal efficiency, generalization and transferability of these models.