Endmember detection in marine environment with oil spill event

Abstract

Oil spill events are a crucial environmental issue. Detection of oil spills is important for both oil exploration and environmental protection. In this paper, investigation of hyperspectral remote sensing is performed for the detection of oil spills and the discrimination of different oil types. Spectral signatures of different oil types are very useful, since they may serve as endmembers in unmixing and classification models. Towards this direction, an oil spectral library, resulting from spectral measurements of artificial oil spills as well as of look-alikes in marine environment was compiled. Samples of four different oil types were used; two crude oils, one marine residual fuel oil, and one light petroleum product. Lookalikes comprise sea water, river discharges, shallow water and water with algae. Spectral measurements were acquired with spectro-radiometer GER1500. Moreover, oil and look-alikes spectral signatures have been examined whether they can be served as endmembers. This was accomplished by testifying their linear independence. After that, synthetic hyperspectral images based on the relevant oil spectral library were created. Several simplex-based endmember algorithms such as sequential maximum angle convex cone (SMACC), vertex component analysis (VCA), n-finder algorithm (N-FINDR), and automatic target generation process (ATGP) were applied on the synthetic images in order to evaluate their effectiveness for detecting oil spill events occurred from different oil types. Results showed that different types of oil spills with various thicknesses can be extracted as endmembers.