Oil platform detection by compact polarimetric synthetic aperture radar

We present a innovative physically-based approach to detect oil platforms by using compact polarimetric (CP) synthetic aperture data. We utilize two RADARSAT-2 fine quad-polarization SAR images of Gulf of Mexico to estimate the CP covariance matrix. The resulting CP data is used to reconstruct pseudo quad-polarization covariance matrix. The Stokes parameters are evaluated using the reconstructed pseudo quad-polarization covariance matrix elements. We further calculate the relative phase with two Stokes parameters. The relative phase is a logical scalar descriptor which can be used to detect the oil platforms. The detected oil platforms are validated with ground truth from NOAA. The proposed method provides a simple and effective mapping technique for oil platform detection.