Machine Learning and Feature Extraction for Industrial Smoke Plumes Detection from Sentinel-2 Images

The detection of smoke plumes by satellite imagery is a comprehensive research topic that can be used to better monitor activity and emissions from the energy and industrial sectors. In this study, we propose a machine learning methodology based on the extraction of relevant features from Sentinel-2 images to perform industrial smoke plume detection. This computer vision problem is modeled as an image classification task based on the presence or absence of plumes from previously identified sources. A dataset of nearly 17,000 hand-labeled images of smoke plumes for activity classification has been compiled to train and evaluate our detection models. The final Gradient Boosting model only uses the 3 RGB bands of Sentinel-2 and after a post-processing step reaches an accuracy of 95%.