On the Mueller Scattering Matrix for SAR Sea Oil Slick Observation

In this letter, a fully polarimetric electromagnetic model for sea surface Mueller matrix is exploited to characterize the scattering from oil and biogenic slicks, under low-to-moderate wind conditions. The model predicts a completely different scattering mechanism for oil-covered and oil-free sea surface, while biogenic slicks are indistinguishable from sea surface in terms of polarimetric scattering. Following this theoretical rationale, a simple and very effective filtering technique is proposed for synthetic aperture radar (SAR) sea oil slick observation. Experiments, accomplished over C-band multilook complex SIR-C/X-SAR data, show the effectiveness of the proposed model and the capabilities of the filter to both observe oil slicks and distinguish them from biogenic look-alikes.