Using Spectral and Spatial Information for Oil Spill Detection in Multi-spectral Imagery

Abstract

Oil spill on the sea surface produced by human activities is disastrous to the ecological environment. How to detect, monitor and track the oil spill are always very important tasks. Due to oil spill often occur in open sea, remotely sensed image provides an effective technology to monitor the sea area. But the oil spill only occur in a very small are in the image, therefore, to detect the oil spill on the sea surface is a challenge problem. This study focuses on the detection of oil slick on sea surface using both spectral and spatial information of the remotely sensed images. Since the oil spill area usually only occupies a few pixels in the image scene, it can be considered as anomaly. By applying anomaly detection algorithm with only spectral information, the oil spill area can be extracted along with other marine phenomena as interference. In order to eliminate the interferences, spatial features are introduced. The experimental result shows the proposed method combining the spatial features of oil spill with spectral information improves the oil spill detection performance.