The Potential Of The Single, Dual And Quad-Pol SAR Data On Oil Slicks Detection

During the oil spills response actions, the rapid location and mapping of the oil slicks at sea surface is needed, as well as the characterization of different types of oils, avoiding false alarms whenever possible. In this way, all information provided by remote sensors can be useful to improve the strategies to cleanup oceanic regions and to protect the vulnerable coastal areas, minimizing possible environmental damages. Synthetic Aperture Radars (SAR) are widely used for this purpose, due to their potential for systematic data acquisition covering large areas with near real time delivery capability, offering different spectral and spatial resolutions, swaths, incidence angles and polarization channels. Since the nineties automatic and semiautomatic algorithms have been developed to detect low backscatter regions related with oil slicks aiming to assist large scale monitoring initiatives. Traditionally, the majority of the SAR data used have commonly been acquired with wide swaths in single or dual-pol ...