Work

The Information Consistency Between Full- and Improved Dual-Polarimetric Mode SAR for Multiscenario Oil Spill Detection

Year: 2025

Type: article

Abstract: Detecting marine oil spills is vital for protecting the marine environment, ensuring maritime traffic safety, supporting marine development, and enabling effective emergency response. The dual-polarimetric (DP) synthetic aperture radar (SAR) system represents an evolution from single to full polarization (FP), which has become an essential tool for oil spill detection with the growing availability of open-source and shared datasets. Recent research has focused on enhancing DP information structures to better exploit this data. This study introduces improved DP models’ structure with modified the scattering vector coefficients to ensure consistency with the corresponding components of the FP system, enabling comprehensive comparison and analysis with traditional DP structure, includes theoretical and quantitative evaluations of simulated data from FP system, as well as validation using real DP scenarios. The results showed the following: (1) The polarimetric entropy HL obtained through the improved DP scattering matrix CL can achieve higher information consistency results closely aligns with FP system and better performance, compared to the typical two DP scattering structures. (2) For multiple polarimetric features from DP scattering matrix (both traditional feature and combination feature), the improved DP scattering matrix CL can be used for oil spill extraction effectively with prominent results. (3) For oil spill extraction, the polarimetric features-based CL tend to have relatively high contribution, especially the H_A feature combination, leading to substantial gains in improved classification performance. This approach not only enriches the structural information of the DP system under VV–VH mode but also improves oil spill identification by integrating multi-structured DP features. Furthermore, it offers a practical alternative when FP data are unavailable.

Source: Sensors

DOI: 10.3390/s25175551

Authors: Guannan Li, Gaohuan Lv, Tong Wang, Xiang Wang, Fen Zhao

Institutions: Ludong University, Nanyang Technological University, National Marine Environmental Monitoring Center

Language: English

Topic: Oil Spill Detection and Mitigation

Subfield: Pollution

Field: Environmental Science

Domain: Physical Sciences

Open Access status: gold

Estimated APC paid: $3,137

Funders: Texas Space Grant Consortium, National Natural Science Foundation of China, National Marine Environmental Monitoring Center, State Oceanic Administration