6 - Oil spill detection based on SAR

Abstract

Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) remote sensing technology has been widely used in the field of marine oil spill detection due to its all-day and all-weather microwave imaging capability. With the continuous development and improvement of SAR system which gradually expands from single polarimetric to polarimetric SAR (Pol-SAR), the complex scattering matrices of images can be measured and more abundant “holographic” information can be obtained through Pol-SAR systems, which is conducive to analyze and interpret the scattering mechanism of oil slick, look-alike and sea water, and then achieve the extraction and detection of oil slick. However, there are still some difficult and challenging work in Pol-SAR oil spill detection, such as the study of the difference in oil spill identification performance between Pol-SAR systems with different modes, the further expansion of polarimetric features space, and the insufficient utilization of polarimetric information. This chapter analyzes and compares the recognition performance of the scattering mechanism of oil spill under different modes of polarimetric SAR based on the polarization theory. The dual-pol SAR with partial polarimetric information and the quad-pol SAR with complete polarimetric information were used to identify and detect marine oil slick. Various polarization characteristics parameters derived from different mechanisms were conducted, and the potential methods of look-alike large elimination for oil spill detection using SAR imagery were also discussed.