Feature extraction for oil spill detection based on SAR images

Abstract

Algorithms based on SAR images for the purpose of detecting illegal oil spill pollution in the marine environment are studied. This paper focus on the feature extraction step, aiming at identifying features that lead to significant improvements in classification performance compared to earlier reported results. Both traditional region descriptors, features tailored to oil spill detection and techniques originally associated with other applications are evaluated. Experimental results show an increase from 89% to 97% in the number of suspected oil spills detected. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.