Comparative Analysis of Remote Sensing Storage Tank Detection Methods Based on Deep Learning

Since the Industrial Revolution, methane has become the second most important greenhouse gas component after CO₂ and the second most important culprit of global warming, leading to serious climate change problems such as droughts, fires, floods, and glacial melting. While most of the methane in the atmosphere comes from emissions from energy activities such as petroleum refining, storage tanks are an important source of methane emissions during the extraction and processing of crude oil and natural gas. Therefore, the use of high-resolution remote sensing image data for oil and gas production sites to achieve efficient and accurate statistics for storage tanks is important to promote the strategic goals of “carbon neutrality and carbon peaking”. Compared with traditional statistical methods for studying oil storage tanks, deep learning-based target detection algorithms are more powerful for multi-scale targets and complex background conditions. In this paper, five deep learning detection algorithms, Faster RCNN, YOLOv5, YOLOv7, RetinaNet and SSD, were selected to conduct experiments on 3568 remote sensing images from five different datasets. The results show that the average accuracy of the Faster RCNN, YOLOv5, YOLOv7 and SSD algorithms is above 0.84, and the F1 scores of YOLOv5, YOLOv7 and SSD algorithms are above 0.80, among which the highest detection accuracy is shown by the SSD algorithm at 0.897 with a high F1 score, while the lowest average accuracy is shown by RetinaNet at only 0.639. The training results of the five algorithms were validated on three images containing differently sized oil storage tanks in complex backgrounds, and the validation results obtained were better, providing more accurate references for practical detection applications in remote sensing of oil storage tank targets in the future.