Attention-gated U-Net for robust cross-domain plastic waste segmentation using a UAV-based hyperspectral SWIR sensor

The proliferation of plastic waste across natural ecosystems has created a global environmental and public health crisis. Monitoring plastic litter using remote sensing remains challenging due to the significant variability in terrain, lighting, and weather conditions. Although earlier approaches, including classical supervised machine learning techniques such as Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA) and Support Vector Machine (SVM), applied to hyperspectral and multispectral data have shown promise in controlled settings, they often may face challenges in generalizing across diverse environmental conditions encountered in real-world scenarios. In this work, we present a deep learning framework for pixelwise segmentation of plastic waste in short-wave infrared (900–1700 nm) hyperspectral imagery acquired from an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV). Our architecture integrates attention gates and residual connections within a U-Net backbone to enhance contextual modeling and spatial-spectral consistency. We introduce a multi-flight dataset spanning over 9 UAV missions across varied environmental settings, consisting of hyperspectral cubes with centimeter-level resolution. Using a leave-one-out cross-validation protocol, our model achieves test accuracy of up to 96.8% (average 90.5%) and a 91.1% F1 score, demonstrating robust generalization to unseen data collected in different environments. Compared to classical models, the deep network captures richer semantic representations, particularly under challenging conditions. This work offers a scalable and deployable tool for automated plastic waste monitoring and represents a significant advancement in remote environmental sensing.