Development Status of Oil Spill Detection System Using SAR Data

Abstract

In recent years, the oil spill detection over sea surface and similar oil material filtration are attracting much attention from the ecological point of view, and synthetic aperture radar (SAR) is considered as an effective way of monitoring such phenomenon due to the day-and-night and all weather observation capability. This paper presents a precise numerical computation of the radar backscatter of various shapes of oil spills on ocean surfaces. At first, the randomly rough dielectric surface with two-scale roughness is generated based on the wins speed on the ocean surface. A two layered medium is generated by adding a thin oil layer on the rough sea surface. Then, the electric fields scattered from the oil spilled ocean surface are computed by the Method of Moments.The backscattering coefficients of the oil-spilled ocean surfaces are computed by the Monte Carlo technique for various surface roughness, oil-layer thicknesses, radar frequencies, radar polarizations and incidence angles. Numerical simulation results are compared with theoretical models and measurement data. The reduction of the backscattering coefficients due to oil-spills on sea surfaces has been analyzed, which may help to detect any oil spill on sea surface, and consequently, to classify SAR images.