AUTOMATIC DETECTION OF OIL SPILLS WITH LEVEL SET SEGMENTATION TECHNIQUE FROM REMOTELY SENSED IMAGERY

The marine environment is under considerable threat from intentional or accidental oil spills, ballast water discharged, dredging and infilling for coastal development, and uncontrolled sewage and industrial wastewater discharges. Monitoring spills and illegal oil discharges is an important component in ensuring compliance with marine protection legislation and general protection of the coastal environments. For the monitoring task an image processing system is needed that can efficiently perform the detection and the tracking of oil spills and in this direction a significant amount of research work has taken place mainly with the use of radar (SAR) remote sensing data. In this paper the level set image segmentation technique was tested for the detection of oil spills. Level set allow the evolving curve to change topology (break and merge) and therefore boundaries of particularly intricate shapes can be extracted. Experimental results demonstrated that the level set segmentation can be used for the efficient detection and monitoring of oil spills, since the method coped with abrupt shape’s deformations and splits.