Water Surface Patch Classification Using Mixture Augmentation for River Scum Index

Urban rivers provide a water environment that influences residential living. River surface monitoring has become crucial for making decisions about where to prioritize cleaning and when to automatically start the cleaning treatment. We focus on the organic mud, or "scum" that accumulates on the river's surface and gives it its peculiar odor and external economic effects on the landscape. Because of its feature of a sparsely distributed and unstable pattern of organic shape, automating the monitoring has proved difficult. We propose a patch classification pipeline to detect scum features on the river surface using mixture image augmentation to increase the diversity between the scum floating on the river and the entangled background on the river surface reflected by nearby structures like buildings, bridges, poles, and barriers. Furthermore, we propose a scum index covered on rivers to help monitor worse grade online, collecting floating scum and deciding on chemical treatment policies. Finally, we show how to use our method on a time series dataset with frames every ten minutes recording river scum events over several days. We discuss the value of our pipeline and its experimental findings.