Oil Spill Detection in Hybrid-Polarimetric SAR Images

Oil spill detection in SAR images operating in a hybrid-polarimetric mode is examined. We propose and review several strategies for oil spill detection in hybrid-polarimetric SAR data. The retrieved measures are successfully applied to SAR data covering oil spill experiments outside Norway and the Deepwater Horizon incident in the Gulf of Mexico. It is shown that, under the assumption of a two-scale Bragg scattering model, a coherence measure may be recovered equally well from hybrid-polarimetric data, as for full-polarimetric data, and that this measure may be retrieved directly from the measurements without the need for any additional assumptions. The results show that low-wind lookalikes may be suppressed at the same time as the contrast of the oil spills is maintained using hybrid-polarimetric data and that multifeature images may be constructed to further enhance the oil spill detection performance. Due to the potential of wide swath widths, we conclude that hybrid-polarity is an attractive mode for future SAR-based oil spill monitoring.