Dark spot detection for characterization of marine surface slicks using UAVSAR quad-pol data

Oil spills are a potential hazard, causing the deaths of millions of aquatic animals and this leaves a calamitous effect on the marine ecosystem. This research focuses on evaluating the potential of polarimetric parameters in discriminating the oil slick from water and also possible thicker/thinner zones within the slick. For this purpose, L-band UAVSAR quad-pol data of the Gulf of Mexico region is exploited. A total number of 19 polarimetric parameters are examined to study their behavior and ability in distinguishing oil slick from water and its own less or more oil accumulated zones. The simulation of compact-pol data from UAVSAR quad-pol data is carried out which has shown good performance in detection and discrimination of oil slick from water. To know the extent of separation between oil and water classes, a statistical separability analysis is carried out. The outcomes of each polarimetric parameter from separability analysis are then quantified with the radial basis function (RBF) supervised Support Vector Machine classifier followed with an accurate estimation of the results. Moreover, a comparison of the achieved and estimated accuracy has shown a significant drop in accuracy values. It has been observed that the highest accuracy is given by LHV compact-pol decomposition and coherency matrix with a classification accuracy of ~ 94.09% and ~ 94.60%, respectively. The proposed methodology has performed well in discriminating the oil slick by utilizing UAVSAR dataset for both quad-pol and compact-pol simulation.