Multiscale oil slick segmentation with Markov chain model

A Markov chain model is applied for the segmentation of oil slicks acquired by SAR sensors. Actually, oil slicks have specific impact on ocean wave spectra. Initial wave spectra may be characterized by three kinds of waves, big, medium and small, which correspond physically to gravity and gravity-capillary waves. The increase of viscosity due to the presence of oil damps gravity-capillary waves. This induces a damping of the backscattering to the sensor, but also a dampening of the energy of the wave spectra. Thus, local segmentation of wave spectra may be achieved by the segmentation of a multiscale decomposition of the original SAR image. In this work, the unsupervised segmentation is achieved by using a vectorial extension of the Hidden Markov Chain (HMC) model. Parameters estimation is performed using the general Iterative Conditional Estimation (ICE) method. The problem of estimating multi-dimensional and non-Gaussian densities is solved by using a Principal Component Analysis (PCA). The algorithm has been applied on an ERS-PRI image. It yields interesting segmentation results with a very limited number of false alarms. Also, the multiscale segmentation proved to be an interesting alternative to classify marginal or degraded slicks.