A physical approach for the observation of oil spills in SAR images

In this paper, a physical approach to support oil spills observation over synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images is presented. Electromagnetic model is based on an enhanced damping model that takes into account oil viscoelastic properties and wind speed. As a matter of fact, a multisensor approach is considered and a constant false alarm rate (CFAR) filter is used to minimize speckle effect. A set of experiments is presented and discussed. They show that oil spill processing is effective over single-look SAR images using mean input data.