An Approach for Detecting and Tracking Oil Slicks on Satellite Images

摘要

This paper describes the combination of severalimage processing techniques to achieve an approach to thedetection and tracking of oil slick using satellite images takenafter some accidents over the sea, as tanker accidents or oil rigexplosions. This work attempts to be a contribution to such task.To get information about the shape and located of the oil spill,once it has been segmented and localized in the image, an activecontour is generated around the oil slick and fitted to it. The useof active contours can provide an estimation of the deformationand the displacement that oil slicks experience over the time.This information could help to estimate the evolution of theseresidues dumped into the sea and to allow their tracking. SeveralENVISAT-ASAR images obtained over several regions in whicha tanker accident occurred, such as it happened over the Spanish,Philippine, Portugal, and Korean coasts, or accidents like the oilrig explosion in the Gulf of Mexico, have been used as testingimages of this process.