Pre-Launch Assessment of RADARSAT Constellation Mission Medium Resolution Modes for Sea Oil Slicks and Lookalike Discrimination

Abstract

The RADARSAT Constellation Mission (RCM) is a Canadian Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) mission, providing C-band SAR data continuity of the RADARSAT-1 and RADARSAT-2 satellite missions. The RCM which was recently launched (June 2019) will provide compact polarimetry (CP) as a polarization option for all non-quad-polarization imaging modes. Maritime pollution monitoring is one of the RCM core applications. Thus, the purpose of this study is to provide an initial evaluation of the expected potential of the RCM mission for maritime pollution monitoring. Herein, we investigate simulated CP SAR data of three RCM Medium Resolution (MR) SAR modes for oil slick detection and discrimination from lookalike (LA) features. Results of our study indicated that the steeper radar incidence angle seems to be preferable for oil slick detection in all examined modes. The ScanSAR 50 m resolution (SC50M) mode showed the highest overall performance in terms of LA and Emulsion (EM) classification (95.4%). This was also valid for LA and Crude Oil (CO) classification (96.7%). The performance of the SC50M mode was slightly higher than that of the ScanSAR 30 m resolution (SC30M) mode.