Texture Feature Application in Oil Spill Detection by Satellite Data

Oil spills in the ocean are one of major environmental concerns, especially in the costal waters. Many satellite sensors, including optical sensors and microwave sensors, have been used to detect oil spills which often exhibit different feature in the satellite images compared with the surrounding waters. In this study, we used texture feature analysis to detect oil spill using MODIS and SAR images. The MODIS images of one incident were analyzed and the results proved the efficiency of algorithm. However, in very near shore regions, delineation of water and oil boundary is noisy due to a similar spectral signature across land-water boundary. The SAR image of Prestige accident was segmented with our method and result is better than the result from the single threshold method.