Deep Learning-Based Real-Time Surf Detection Model During Typhoon Events

Surf during typhoon events poses severe threats to coastal infrastructure and public safety. Traditional monitoring approaches, including in situ sensors and numerical simulations, face inherent limitations in capturing surf impacts—sensors are constrained by point-based measurements, while simulations require intensive computational resources for real-time monitoring. Video-based monitoring offers promising potential for continuous surf observation, yet the development of deep learning models for surf detection remains underexplored, primarily due to the lack of high-quality training datasets from typhoon events. To bridge this gap, we propose a lightweight YOLO (You Only Look Once) based framework for real-time surf detection. A novel dataset of 2855 labeled images with surf annotations, collected from five typhoon events at the Chongwu Tide Gauge Station, captures diverse scenarios such as daytime, nighttime, and extreme weather conditions. The proposed YOLOv6n model achieved 99.3% mAP50 at 161.8 FPS, outperforming both other YOLO variants and traditional two-stage detectors in accuracy and computational efficiency. Scaling analysis further revealed that YOLO models with 2–5 M parameters provide an optimal trade-off between accuracy and computational efficiency. These findings demonstrate the effectiveness of YOLO-based video monitoring systems for real-time surf detection, offering a practical and reliable solution for coastal hazard monitoring under extreme weather conditions.