Analysis of oil spill properties based on dual-polarization RADARSAT-2 imagery

Marine oil spills is a matter of great concern since it causes environmental disasters and threats the ecological system, thus the capability to detect precisely and analyze sufficiently is a significant guarantee to realize the management followed by oil spill. The Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) has recognized as a key remote sensing tool for oil spill monitoring and detecting. This paper uses modified GBVS model to extract oil spill area as the region of interest based on the significant difference between oil-covered region and background sea-water. First, normalize the mean value of the oil spill image, and then filter out the high value by threshold definition; get the final region based the fusion saliency map with GBVS and mean difference. In the end, we discuss four well-known polarization features of oil/sea based on dual-polarization RADARSAT-2 imagery. The study demonstrates that dual-polarization SAR system has real good potential in the study of oil spill detection.