Marine Radar Oil-Spill Monitoring through Local Adaptive Thresholding

Abstract

Marine oil spills affect the environment, economy, and quality of life for coastal inhabitants. This article presents a method of X-band marine radar oil-spill identification by considering the marine radar images of the 2010 Dalian 7-16 accident. The Prewitt operator was improved and a linear interpolation was proposed to suppress co-channel interferences. In addition, a model of a gray-intensity-correcting matrix is proposed to smooth a whole image, thus displaying the oil film more intuitively. Furthermore, a contrast-limited adaptive histogram equalization method was used to increase the contrast inside and outside the oil film. Moreover, the local adaptive thresholding method was improved to segment the oil spills. The results show that the proposed method is an improvement on similar previous approaches for this task when employing X-band marine radar images. The proposed method can provide technical and theoretical bases for emergency response, damage assessment, and liability identification of oil spills.

Keywords:

• Marine radar
• oil-spill identification
• remote sensing; image processing

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This research was funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China [grant number 51709031]; the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities [grant number 3132018145]; the Doctoral Scientific Research Foundation of Liaoning Province [grant number 201601069].