Analysis of Oil Storage Trend Using KOMPSAT-5 SAR Data

Monitoring oil storage states with observing oil tanks provides significant indicators in terms of economics, finance and trade. Crude oil is usually stored in floating roof tanks due to the chemical properties of the reservoir. Through the geometry of floating roofs, satellite synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images can be employed to estimate more accurate oil storage states under bad weather conditions, cloud occlusions, rather than using optical and infrared images. In this paper, the proposed method can provide an accurate oil storage states without human interventions using KOMPSAT-5 SAR images. The proposed method reduces errors caused from the noise effects of SAR images and yields a more reliable change trend. Also, the generality for the various images with different satellite and image parameters is achieved. With the proposed algorithm, consistent and continuous application can be conducted with several images.