Estimating the volume of oil tanks based on high-resolution remote sensing images

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to obtain oil tank volumes from high-resolution satellite imagery to meet the need to measure oil tank volume globally. A preprocessed remote sensing HSV image is used to extract the shadow of the oil tank by Otsu thresholding, shadow area thresholding, and morphological closing. The oil tank shadow is crescent-shaped. Hence, a median method based on sub-pixel subdivision positioning is used to calculate the shadow length of the oil tank and then determine its height with high precision. The top of the tank and its radius in the image are identified using the Hough transform. The final tank volume is calculated using its height and radius. A high-resolution Gaofen 2 optical remote sensing image is used to evaluate the proposed method. The actual height and volume of the tank we tested were 21.8 m and 109,532 m3. The experimental results show that the mean absolute error of the height of the tank calculated by the median method is 0.238 m, the relative error is within 1.15%, and the RMES is 0.23. The result is better than the previous work. The absolute error between the calculated and the actual tank volumes ranges between 416 and 3050 m3, and the relative error ranges between 0.38% and 2.78%. These results indicate that the proposed method can calculate the volume of oil tanks with high precision and sufficient accuracy for practical applications.