Development of television camera for detecting oil film floating on the ocean

A television camera system, which automatically picks out exclusive images of the oil at real time, is described. This system essentially consists of two optical band pass filters (BPFs), two CCD cameras and image processing software. Due to the multiple-beam interference resulted from the oil film, there is a marked difference of intensity between light reflected from the surface of the sea and that from oil film. By obtaining these different images, the place with oil can be distinguished. Emphasis of our work is to compensate the effect of dispersion of sunlight intensity and CCD's quantum efficiency on oil film detection probability. Laboratory experiments using static glass coated with Al 2 O 3 film have been conducted. The experimental results showed that sensing probability is dependent on the sample thickness, and greatly on the incident angle. This result is agreed quite well with the simulation done our coauthors in earlier work.