Marine Mucilage Monitoring of the Adriatic Sea With Perturbed Linear Mixing Model

Recent widespread marine mucilage formations in the Mediterranean, particularly in Türkiye and Italy, have raised significant environmental concerns. Monitoring and analyzing these events are crucial for the protection of marine ecosystems. Recently, unmixing-based approaches on hyperspectral satellite data have been proposed for marine mucilage monitoring, offering not only promising performance, but also key advantages such as not requiring labeled training data or carefully selected thresholds. Additionally, accounting for spectral variability has been shown to result in increased monitoring performance. Building on the previous studies, this paper presents marine mucilage monitoring using unmixing with the Perturbed Linear Mixing Model (PLMM). The recent mucilage event off the coast of Italy is investigated, on hyperspectral data acquired by the Earth Surface Mineral Dust Source Investigation (EMIT) mission. Experimental results demonstrate the approach’s effectiveness in mucilage monitoring, and have the potential to provide new insights.