Geospatial Analysis Approaches to Improve the Oil Spill Detection in SAR Images

Reliable oil spill detections in satellite Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) imagery require the analysis of many different factors. In many cases the categorisation of the monitored area based on environmental ancillary information is essential for the definition of the reliability of oil spill detections in SAR imagery. This study introduces the advantages of using geospatial analysis of vessel traffic as a supplementary information source for the oil spill probability assessment in SAR imagery. Because of the leak of free accessible Automatic Identification Systems (AIS) data and their limited coverage the concept of this study is to analyse the International Comprehensive Ocean-Atmosphere Data Set (ICOADS) within a geographic information system (GIS) to identify the main shipping lanes, weight them by importance and categorise the observed area in low, medium and high probability for oil spill detections. Additionally port locations were also accounted for the analysis. The derived oil spill probability categorisation was finally applied to the Joint Research Centre (JRC)¿s Oil Spill Database for the Mediterranean Sea and the concentration of oil spill detections confirms the strong link with shipping lanes.

MUELLENHOFF Oliver;  BULGARELLI Barbara;  FERRARO DI SILVI E CASTIGLIONE Guido;  TOPOUZELIS Konstantinos; 

2009-07-14

Slovenian Society for Transport Science and University of Ljubljana Faculty of Maritime Studies and Transport

JRC44190

https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/handle/JRC44190,