Automatic error correction: Improving annotation quality for model optimization in oil-exploration related land disturbances mapping

The manual extraction of land disturbances associated with oil exploration, which normally includes resource roads, mining facilities, and well pads, presents significant challenges in terms of cost and time. Accurate monitoring and mapping of land disturbances resulting from oil exploration plays a crucial role in conducting comprehensive environmental assessments and facilitating effective land reclamation initiatives. However, prevailing deep learning methodologies in the realm of oil and gas exploration primarily focus on oil spill detection, neglecting the critical aspect of land disturbances resulting from oil exploration, thus overlooking the impact on land. Furthermore, given that the well sites are scattered and relatively diminutive compared to other land covers, their detection poses substantial difficulties. This paper proposes an automatic error-correcting (AEC) algorithm to address deficiencies in ground truth data quality. This AEC method was integrated into the deep-learning framework for land disturbance extraction, specifically tailored for land disturbances analysis associated with oil exploration. The efficacy of our method was validated on a dataset collected in Alberta covering an area of oil sand mining sites. The application of the AEC algorithm significantly enhanced the accuracy of land disturbance analysis, thereby contributing to a more effective hydrocarbon exploration impact analysis and facilitating the timely planning by the Alberta government. The results demonstrate notable improvements in both average pixel accuracy (AA) and mean intersection over union (mIoU), ranging from 8.3% to 15.4% and 0.5% to 5.8%, respectively. These enhancements, which have profound implications for the precision of land disturbance detection, prove that the proposed AEC algorithm can serve a dual purpose: correcting errors in the dataset and efficiently detecting land disturbance features in the oil exploration area.