Radar remote sensing for oil spill classification (optimization for enhanced classification)

Oil spills are a major factor in the ocean pollution. The complications involved in detecting oil spills are due to varying wind and sea surface conditions. The main aim of this paper is to find the best combination of transmit and receive polarizations for optimal detection of oil spills which can extend the tolerance and validity ranges of single and dual polarization spaceborne missions. The optimization has to be handled in a careful way for the oil spill detection because the backscattering is very low from the oil spilled region due to high Fresnel reflection. This paper deals with an improved optimization technique for the detection and classification scheme using the spaceborne imaging radar (SIR) data sets of the oil spilled regions. Both the theory and the experimental results obtained are discussed.