A multitemporal change detection solution to oil spill monitoring

This paper develops a novel oil spill detection approach by using the multitemporal optical remote sensing images. Differently from the traditional oil spill detection methods that mainly carried out on a monotemporal image, the proposed approach opens a new perspective to solve the considered oil spill detection problem in a multitemporal domain by investigating the potential capability of change detection (CD) techniques. A coarse to fine multitemporal change analysis is defined to analyze the spectral-temporal variation of change targets that present in the oil spill scenario. Suspected oil spills and non-relevant changes are identified and discriminated according to a multiple-change detection in the proposed technique. The proposed approach provides a quick, yet effective oil spill detection solution in an unsupervised way, which is valuable and important in practical oil spill detection applications. Experimental results obtained on real HJ-1 satellite images presenting the oil spill event in northern Gulf of Mexico in 2010 confirmed the effectiveness of the proposed method.