The polarimetric features of oil spills in full polarimetric synthetic aperture radar images

Compared with single-polarized synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images, full polarimetric SAR images contain not only geometrical and backward scattering characteristics, but also the polarization features of the scattering targets. Therefore, the polarimetric SAR has more advantages for oil spill detection on the sea surface. As a crucial step in the oil spill detection, a feature extraction directly influences the accuracy of oil spill discrimination. The polarimetric features of sea oil spills, such as polarimetric entropy, average scatter angle, in the full polarimetric SAR images are analyzed firstly. And a new polarimetric parameter P which reflects the proportion between Bragg and specular scattering signals is proposed. In order to investigate the capability of the polarimetric features for observing an oil spill, systematic comparisons and analyses of the multipolarization features are provided on the basis of the full polarimetric SAR images acquired by SIR-C/X-SAR and Radarsat-2. The experiment results show that in C-band SAR images the oil spills can be detected more easily than in L-band SAR images under low to moderate wind speed conditions. Moreover, it also finds that the new polarimetric parameter is sensitive to the sea surface scattering mechanisms. And the experiment results demonstrate that the new polarimetric parameter and pedestal height perform better than other polarimetric parameters for the oil spill detection in the C-band SAR images.