A neural network approach for semi-automatic detection of oil spills in Eur
opean remote sensing satellite-synthetic aperture radar (ERS-SAR) imagery i
s presented, The network input is a vector containing the values of a set o
f features characterizing an oil spill candidate. The classification perfor
mance of the algorithm has been evaluated on a data set containing verified
examples of oil spill and look-alike, A direct analysis of the information
content of the calculated features has been also carried out through an ex
tended pruning procedure of the net.