The Gulf of Mexico oil rig accident: analysis by different SAR satellite images

摘要

The management of the monitoring oil spills over the sea surface is a very important and actual task for international environmental agencies, due to the continuous risks represented by possible accidents involving either rigs or tankers. On the other hand the increase of remote sensing space missions can definitely improve our capabilities in this kind of activity. In this paper we consider the dramatic Gulf of Mexico oil spill event of 2010 to investigate on the types of information that could be provided by the available SAR images collection which included different polarizations and bands. With an eye to the implementation of fully automatic processing chains, an assessment of a novel segmentation technique based on PCNN (Pulse Coupled Neural Networks) was also carried out.