Elongated strip oil spill segmentation based on a cooperative model

This paper describes a novel framework to segment elongated strips of marine oil spill based on a cooperative model. We construct a higher-order energy function which characterizes data consistency and smoothness of varying orders in an integrated framework. We model the data consistency in terms of a finite Gamma mixture and then estimate its parameter values using an expectation maximization (EM) algorithm. In order to characterise the smoothness term we exploit a cooperative model which not only penalizes the length but also addresses the diversity of the object boundary. This advantage makes our framework more effective for segmenting elongated strip oil spill than traditional energy minimization methods such as graph cuts. Our framework is further evaluated using practical SAR images of oil spill recordings and its effectiveness is validated.