Oil spill detection using marine SAR images

A probabilistic approach to distinguish oil spills from other similar ocean ic features in marine Synthetic Aperture Radar ( SAR) images has been devel oped and tested. The method uses statistical information obtained from prev ious mesurements of physical and geometrical characteristics for both oil s pill and natural features. A sample image is evaluated using two different procedures to determine the probability that it is an oil spill, the result s of the two procedures are then compared. The classification-algorithm per formance was evaluated using a test dataset containing 80 examples that wer e oil spills and 43 that were natural features exhibiting characteristics s imilar to oil spills: more than 80% of the samples were classified correctl y. The reliability of the method was then determined using a new dataset an d similar results were obtained.