A fuzzy approach to oil spill detection an SAR images

A three-step algorithm is developed to segment oil spills from a marine background on synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data. First, filtering is performed to reduce speckle noise. Then fuzzy clustering is carried out to obtain a preliminary partition of the pixels on the basis of their grey level intensities; a very simple cluster validity criterion is used to determine the optimal number of clusters present in the data. A final step involves a cluster merging procedure driven by edge information provided by a Sobel operator. The algorithm has been tested on SEASAT images.