An Integrated Fuzzy Classification System for Automatic Oil Spill Detection Using SAR Images

摘要

Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) images are extensively used for the determination of oil slicks in the marine environment, as they are independent of local weather conditions and cloudiness. Oil spills are recognized by the expert's eye as dark patterns of characteristic shape in particular context. However, the major difficulty to be dealt with is to differentiate between oil spills and look-alikes of natural origin. A fully automated system for the identification of possible oil spills that imitates the expert's choice and decisions has been developed. The system's architecture comprises several distinct modules of supplementary operation (georeferencing, land masking, thresholding, segmentation) and uses their contribution to the analysis and assignment of the probability of a dark image shape to be an oil spill by means of a fuzzy classifier. The output consists of several images and tables providing the user with all relevant information as well as supporting decision making. The case study area was the Aegean Sea in Greece. The system responded very satisfactorily for all 35 images processed. The complete procedure described above is a fully automated stand-alone application running under Windows operating system.