An Approach for Detecting and Tracking Oil Slicks on Satellite Images

This paper describes the combination of several image processing techniques to achieve an approach to the detection and tracking of oil slick using satellite images taken after some accidents over the sea, as tanker accidents or oil rig explosions. This work attempts to be a contribution to such task. To get information about the shape and located of the oil spill, once it has been segmented and localized in the image, an active contour is generated around the oil slick and fitted to it. The use of active contours can provide an estimation of the deformation and the displacement that oil slicks experience over the time. This information could help to estimate the evolution of these residues dumped into the sea and to allow their tracking. Several ENVISAT-ASAR images obtained over several regions in which a tanker accident occurred, such as it happened over the Spanish, Philippine, Portugal, and Korean coasts, or accidents like the oil rig explosion in the Gulf of Mexico, have been used as testing images of this process.