Plume Segmentation from MethaneSAT with Cross-Sensor Transfer Learning and Physics-Informed Postprocessing

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Pérez-Carrasco, Manuel, Nasr, Maya, Zhang, Zhan, Chulakadabba, Apisada, Roger, Javier, Ottenheimer, Raia, Roche, Sébastien, Sargent, Maryann, Miller, Chris Chan, Varon, Daniel, Warren, Jack, Guanter, Luis, Sun, Kang, Franklin, Jonathan, Chen, Jia, Garraffo, Cecilia, Liu, Xiong, Gautam, Ritesh, Wofsy, Steven
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2026
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author Pérez-Carrasco, Manuel
Nasr, Maya
Zhang, Zhan
Chulakadabba, Apisada
Roger, Javier
Ottenheimer, Raia
Roche, Sébastien
Sargent, Maryann
Miller, Chris Chan
Varon, Daniel
Warren, Jack
Guanter, Luis
Sun, Kang
Franklin, Jonathan
Chen, Jia
Garraffo, Cecilia
Liu, Xiong
Gautam, Ritesh
Wofsy, Steven
author_facet Pérez-Carrasco, Manuel
Nasr, Maya
Zhang, Zhan
Chulakadabba, Apisada
Roger, Javier
Ottenheimer, Raia
Roche, Sébastien
Sargent, Maryann
Miller, Chris Chan
Varon, Daniel
Warren, Jack
Guanter, Luis
Sun, Kang
Franklin, Jonathan
Chen, Jia
Garraffo, Cecilia
Liu, Xiong
Gautam, Ritesh
Wofsy, Steven
contents Automated detection and masking of individual methane plumes from satellite imagery is important for operational emission attribution and quantification. We present a machine learning framework for plume detection from MethaneSAT retrieved column-averaged dry-air mole fractions of methane. We address two core challenges: the scarcity of labeled MethaneSAT data and the need for inference reliability across diverse atmospheric and surface conditions. We first demonstrate that Mask R-CNN with a ResNet-50 backbone outperforms U-Net semantic segmentation on both MethaneAIR (an airborne version of MethaneSAT) and MethaneSAT data, with pixel-level F1 score gains of 10.49 and 5.48 respectively. To address MethaneSAT data scarcity, we evaluate three cross-sensor transfer strategies leveraging MethaneAIR flights and synthetic plumes. Mask R-CNN with ResNet-50 fine-tuned from MethaneAIR pre-trained weights is the most effective strategy, achieving instance-level precision of 0.60 and a near-perfect recall of 0.98 at the baseline operating point. A physics-informed post-processing pipeline converts detections into two operationally distinct modes. The first is a high-sensitivity mode that applies morphological filtering and proximity-based merging for comprehensive emission screening, achieving precision of 0.71 and recall of 0.94. The second is a high-precision mode that additionally applies a distribution-based classifier for confident source attribution, achieving precision of 0.92 and recall of 0.70. Manual review of detections classified as false positives against our wavelet-based ground truth labels reveals that a meaningful fraction of cases correspond to real methane enhancements excluded by conservative labeling criteria, indicating that precision values reported are lower bounds on true detection performance... Our data and code are available at: https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/FR959H
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_24273
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Plume Segmentation from MethaneSAT with Cross-Sensor Transfer Learning and Physics-Informed Postprocessing
Pérez-Carrasco, Manuel
Nasr, Maya
Zhang, Zhan
Chulakadabba, Apisada
Roger, Javier
Ottenheimer, Raia
Roche, Sébastien
Sargent, Maryann
Miller, Chris Chan
Varon, Daniel
Warren, Jack
Guanter, Luis
Sun, Kang
Franklin, Jonathan
Chen, Jia
Garraffo, Cecilia
Liu, Xiong
Gautam, Ritesh
Wofsy, Steven
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Atmospheric and Oceanic Physics
Automated detection and masking of individual methane plumes from satellite imagery is important for operational emission attribution and quantification. We present a machine learning framework for plume detection from MethaneSAT retrieved column-averaged dry-air mole fractions of methane. We address two core challenges: the scarcity of labeled MethaneSAT data and the need for inference reliability across diverse atmospheric and surface conditions. We first demonstrate that Mask R-CNN with a ResNet-50 backbone outperforms U-Net semantic segmentation on both MethaneAIR (an airborne version of MethaneSAT) and MethaneSAT data, with pixel-level F1 score gains of 10.49 and 5.48 respectively. To address MethaneSAT data scarcity, we evaluate three cross-sensor transfer strategies leveraging MethaneAIR flights and synthetic plumes. Mask R-CNN with ResNet-50 fine-tuned from MethaneAIR pre-trained weights is the most effective strategy, achieving instance-level precision of 0.60 and a near-perfect recall of 0.98 at the baseline operating point. A physics-informed post-processing pipeline converts detections into two operationally distinct modes. The first is a high-sensitivity mode that applies morphological filtering and proximity-based merging for comprehensive emission screening, achieving precision of 0.71 and recall of 0.94. The second is a high-precision mode that additionally applies a distribution-based classifier for confident source attribution, achieving precision of 0.92 and recall of 0.70. Manual review of detections classified as false positives against our wavelet-based ground truth labels reveals that a meaningful fraction of cases correspond to real methane enhancements excluded by conservative labeling criteria, indicating that precision values reported are lower bounds on true detection performance... Our data and code are available at: https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/FR959H
title Plume Segmentation from MethaneSAT with Cross-Sensor Transfer Learning and Physics-Informed Postprocessing
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Atmospheric and Oceanic Physics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.24273