Abstract
Oil extraction and transportation may lead to small or large scale accidental spills, whether at sea or on land. Detecting these spills is a major problem that can be addressed by means of hyperspectral images and specific processing methods. In this work, several cases of onshore oil spills are studied. First, a controlled experiment was carried out: four boxes containing soil or sand mixed with crude oil or gasoil were deployed on the ONERA site near Fauga, France, and were overflown by HySpex hyperspectral cameras. Owing to this controlled experiment, different detection strategies were developed and tested, with a particular focus on the most automated methods requiring the least supervision. The methods developed were then applied to two very different cases: mapping of the shoreline contaminated due to the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon (DWH) platform based on AVIRIS images (AVIRIS: Airborne Visible/InfraRed Imaging Spectrometer), and detection of a tar pit on a former oil exploration site. The detection strategy depends on the type of oil, light or heavy, recently or formerly spilled, and on the substrate. In the first case (controlled experiment), the proposed methods included spectral index calculations, anomaly detection and spectral unmixing. In the case of DWH, spectral indices were computed and the unmixing method was tested. Finally, to detect the tar pit, a strategy based on anomaly detection and spectral indices was applied. In all the cases studied, the proposed methods were successful in detecting and mapping the oil pollution.
Highlights
The most significant onshore oil spills are due to well blowouts and pipeline ruptures
The aim of this study was to develop strategies to detect very different cases of petroleum pollution: (i) oils mixed with soil or sand, (ii) oil deposited on shorelines, and (iii) tar pits
The second is based on anomaly detection using prior knowledge to decrease the false-alarm rate
Summary
The most significant onshore oil spills are due to well blowouts and pipeline ruptures. This report provides statistics on oil tanker spills between 1970 and 2019. It shows that the number of spills of more than seven tonnes has significantly decreased, from 78.8 to 6.2 per year (the averages for the 1970s and the 2010s, respectively), eighteen spills greater than 700 tonnes still occurred over the past decade. It is essential to have observation means and associated processing tools able to detect the various forms of pollution and to monitor the polluted areas. For this issue, hyperspectral imaging, which offers the possibility of differentiating materials with only subtle spectral signature differences
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