Comparative detections of oil spill using multimode radarsat-1 synthetic aperture radar satellite data

Oil spill or leakage into waterways and ocean spreads very rapidly due to the action of wind and currents. The study of the behavior and movement of these oil spills in sea had become imperative in describing a suitable management plan for mitigating the adverse impacts arising from such accidents. But the inherent difficulty of discriminating between oil spills and look-alikes is a main challenge with Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) satellite data and this is a drawback, which makes it difficult to develop a fully automated algorithm for detection of oil spill. As such, an automatic algorithm with a reliable confidence estimator of oil spill would be highly desirable. The main objective of this work is to develop comparative automatic detection procedures for oil spill pixels in multimode (Standard beam S2, Wide beam W1 and fine beam F1) RADARSAT-1 SAR satellite data that were acquired in the Malacca Straits using three algorithms namely, textures using cooccurrence matrix, post supervised classification, and neural network (NN) for oil spill detection with window size 7 x 7. The results show that the mean textures from co-occurrence matrix is the best indicator for oil spill detection as it can discriminate oil spill from its surrounding such as look-alikes, sea surface and land. The entropy and contrast textures can be mainly used for look-like detections. The receiver operator characteristic (ROC) was used to determine the accuracy of oil spill detection from RADARSAT-1 SAR data. The results show that oil spills, lookalikes, and sea surface roughness are perfectly discriminated with an area difference of 20% for oil spill, 35% look–alikes, 15% land and 30% for the sea roughness. The NN shows higher performance in automatic detection of oil spill in RADARSAT-1 SAR data as compared to other algorithms with standard deviation of 0.12. It can therefore be concluded that NN algorithm is an appropriate algorithm for oil spill automatic detection and W1 beam mode is appropriate for oil spill and look-alikes discrimination and detection

Advanced Geoscience Remote Sensing

Nowadays, advanced remote sensing technology plays tremendous roles to build a quantitative and comprehensive understanding of how the Earth system operates. The advanced remote sensing technology is also used widely to monitor and survey the natural disasters and man-made pollution. Besides, telecommunication is considered as precise advanced remote sensing technology tool. Indeed precise usages of remote sensing and telecommunication without a comprehensive understanding of mathematics and physics. This book has three parts (i) microwave remote sensing applications, (ii) nuclear, geophysics and telecommunication; and (iii) environment remote sensing investigations

Offshore oil spill detection using synthetic aperture radar

Among the different types of marine pollution, oil spill has been considered as a major threat to the sea ecosystems. The source of the oil pollution can be located on the mainland or directly at sea. The sources of oil pollution at sea are discharges coming from ships, offshore platforms or natural seepage from sea bed. Oil pollution from sea-based sources can be accidental or deliberate. Different sensors to detect and monitor oil spills could be onboard vessels, aircraft, or satellites. Vessels equipped with specialised radars, can detect oil at sea but they can cover a very limited area. One of the established ways to monitor sea-based oil pollution is the use of satellites equipped with Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR).The aim of the work presented in this thesis is to identify optimum set of feature extracted parameters and implement methods at various stages for oil spill detection from Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) imagery. More than 200 images of ERS-2, ENVSAT and RADARSAT 2 SAR sensor have been used to assess proposed feature vector for oil spill detection methodology, which involves three stages: segmentation for dark spot detection, feature extraction and classification of feature vector. Unfortunately oil spill is not only the phenomenon that can create a dark spot in SAR imagery. There are several others meteorological and oceanographic and wind induced phenomena which may lead to a dark spot in SAR imagery. Therefore, these dark objects also appear similar to the dark spot due to oil spill and are called as look-alikes. These look-alikes thus cause difficulty in detecting oil spill spots as their primary characteristic similar to oil spill spots. To get over this difficulty, feature extraction becomes important; a stage which may involve selection of appropriate feature extraction parameters. The main objective of this dissertation is to identify the optimum feature vector in order to segregate oil spill and ‘look-alike’ spots. A total of 44 Feature extracted parameters have been studied. For segmentation, four methods; based on edge detection, adaptive theresholding, artificial neural network (ANN) segmentation and the other on contrast split segmentation have been implemented. Spot features are extracted from both the dark spots themselves and their surroundings. Classification stage was performed using two different classification techniques, first one is based on ANN and the other based on a two-stage processing that combines classification tree analysis and fuzzy logic. A modified feature vector, including both new and improved features, is suggested for better description of different types of dark spots. An ANN classifier using full spectrum of feature parameters has also been developed and evaluated. The implemented methodology appears promising in detecting dark spots and discriminating oil spills from look-alikes and processing time is well below any operational service requirements

Turbulent structure in environmental flows: effects of stratification and rotation

Several series of experiments in stratified and in rotating/stratified decaying flows after a grid is used to stir the two layer stable fluid brine and fresh water set up. We measure by comparing the gained potential energy with the available kinetic energy AKE, the relative efficiency of mixing. The experiments in stratified rotating flows with grid driven turbulence were both periodic (quasi stationary) and non-monotonic (decaying) forcing. This thesis compares experimental, numerical and field observations on the structure and Topology of the Stratified Rotating Flows as well as their decay, the horizontal spectra changes appreciable with slopes from 1.1 to 5, but vorticity and local circulation, and also the initial topology and forcing of the flow. A detailed study of the vorticity decay and vortex and energy structure has been performed, the new results show that neither stratified nor rotating flows exhibit pure 2D structures. The work parameterizes the role of the Richardson number and the Rossby number, both in the experiments and in the ocean visualizations is very important. The conditions of vortex decay show the effects of the internal waves in the decay turbulent conditions both for stratified and rotating flows. The parameter space (Re,Ri,Ro) has been used to interpret many previously disconnected explanations of the 2D-3D turbulent behaviour. The comparison of numerical simulations with experiments has allowed implementing new theoretical aspects of the interaction between waves and vortices finding the surprising and very interesting result that these interactions depend on the level of enstrophy. This also leads to new ways of using multifractal analysis ad intermittency in ocean environmental observations. A large collection of SAR images obtained from three European coastal areas were used for routine satellite analysis by SAR and other sensors, which seem very important to build seasonal databases of the dynamic conditions of ocean mixing. The topology of the basic flow is very important and in particular the topology of the vortices and their decay which depends on ambient factors such as wave activity, wind and currents. We find more realistic estimates of the spatial/temporal non-homogeneities (and intermittency obtained as spatial correlations of the turbulent dissipation); these values are used to parameterize the sea surface turbulence, as well as a laboratory experiments at a variety of scales. Using multi-fractal geometry as well, we can establish now a theoretical pattern for the turbulence behaviour that is reflected in the different descriptors. Vorticity evolution is smoother and different than that of scalar or tracer density. The correlation between the local Ri and the fractal dimension detected from energy or entropy is good. Using multi-fractal geometry we can also establish certain regions of higher local activity used to establish the geometry of the turbulence mixing that needs to be studied in detail when interpreting the complex balance between the direct 3D Kolmogorov type cascade and the Inverse 2D Kraichnan type cascade

Remote sensing for biodiversity monitoring: a review of methods for biodiversity indicator extraction and assessment of progress towards international targets

Recognizing the imperative need for biodiversity protection, the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) has recently established new targets towards 2020, the so-called Aichi targets, and updated proposed sets of indicators to quantitatively monitor the progress towards these targets. Remote sensing has been increasingly contributing to timely, accurate, and cost-effective assessment of biodiversity-related characteristics and functions during the last years. However, most relevant studies constitute individual research efforts, rarely related with the extraction of widely adopted CBD biodiversity indicators. Furthermore, systematic operational use of remote sensing data by managing authorities has still been limited. In this study, the Aichi targets and the related CBD indicators whose monitoring can be facilitated by remote sensing are identified. For each headline indicator a number of recent remote sensing approaches able for the extraction of related properties are reviewed. Methods cover a wide range of fields, including: habitat extent and condition monitoring; species distribution; pressures from unsustainable management, pollution and climate change; ecosystem service monitoring; and conservation status assessment of protected areas. The advantages and limitations of different remote sensing data and algorithms are discussed. Sorting of the methods based on their reported accuracies is attempted, when possible. The extensive literature survey aims at reviewing highly performing methods that can be used for large-area, effective, and timely biodiversity assessment, to encourage the more systematic use of remote sensing solutions in monitoring progress towards the Aichi targets, and to decrease the gaps between the remote sensing and management communities

Advanced techniques for classification of polarimetric synthetic aperture radar data

With various remote sensing technologies to aid Earth Observation, radar-based imaging is one of them gaining major interests due to advances in its imaging techniques in form of syn-thetic aperture radar (SAR) and polarimetry. The majority of radar applications focus on mon-itoring, detecting, and classifying local or global areas of interests to support humans within their efforts of decision-making, analysis, and interpretation of Earth’s environment. This thesis focuses on improving the classification performance and process particularly concerning the application of land use and land cover over polarimetric SAR (PolSAR) data. To achieve this, three contributions are studied related to superior feature description and ad-vanced machine-learning techniques including classifiers, principles, and data exploitation. First, this thesis investigates the application of color features within PolSAR image classi-fication to provide additional discrimination on top of the conventional scattering information and texture features. The color features are extracted over the visual presentation of fully and partially polarimetric SAR data by generation of pseudo color images. Within the experiments, the obtained results demonstrated that with the addition of the considered color features, the achieved classification performances outperformed results with common PolSAR features alone as well as achieved higher classification accuracies compared to the traditional combination of PolSAR and texture features. Second, to address the large-scale learning challenge in PolSAR image classification with the utmost efficiency, this thesis introduces the application of an adaptive and data-driven supervised classification topology called Collective Network of Binary Classifiers, CNBC. This topology incorporates active learning to support human users with the analysis and interpretation of PolSAR data focusing on collections of images, where changes or updates to the existing classifier might be required frequently due to surface, terrain, and object changes as well as certain variations in capturing time and position. Evaluations demonstrated the capabilities of CNBC over an extensive set of experimental results regarding the adaptation and data-driven classification of single as well as collections of PolSAR images. The experimental results verified that the evolutionary classification topology, CNBC, did provide an efficient solution for the problems of scalability and dynamic adaptability allowing both feature space dimensions and the number of terrain classes in PolSAR image collections to vary dynamically. Third, most PolSAR classification problems are undertaken by supervised machine learn-ing, which require manually labeled ground truth data available. To reduce the manual labeling efforts, supervised and unsupervised learning approaches are combined into semi-supervised learning to utilize the huge amount of unlabeled data. The application of semi-supervised learning in this thesis is motivated by ill-posed classification tasks related to the small training size problem. Therefore, this thesis investigates how much ground truth is actually necessary for certain classification problems to achieve satisfactory results in a supervised and semi-supervised learning scenario. To address this, two semi-supervised approaches are proposed by unsupervised extension of the training data and ensemble-based self-training. The evaluations showed that significant speed-ups and improvements in classification performance are achieved. In particular, for a remote sensing application such as PolSAR image classification, it is advantageous to exploit the location-based information from the labeled training data. Each of the developed techniques provides its stand-alone contribution from different viewpoints to improve land use and land cover classification. The introduction of a new fea-ture for better discrimination is independent of the underlying classification algorithms used. The application of the CNBC topology is applicable to various classification problems no matter how the underlying data have been acquired, for example in case of remote sensing data. Moreover, the semi-supervised learning approach tackles the challenge of utilizing the unlabeled data. By combining these techniques for superior feature description and advanced machine-learning techniques exploiting classifier topologies and data, further contributions to polarimetric SAR image classification are made. According to the performance evaluations conducted including visual and numerical assessments, the proposed and investigated tech-niques showed valuable improvements and are able to aid the analysis and interpretation of PolSAR image data. Due to the generic nature of the developed techniques, their applications to other remote sensing data will require only minor adjustments

Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) Meets Deep Learning

This reprint focuses on the application of the combination of synthetic aperture radars and depth learning technology. It aims to further promote the development of SAR image intelligent interpretation technology. A synthetic aperture radar (SAR) is an important active microwave imaging sensor, whose all-day and all-weather working capacity give it an important place in the remote sensing community. Since the United States launched the first SAR satellite, SAR has received much attention in the remote sensing community, e.g., in geological exploration, topographic mapping, disaster forecast, and traffic monitoring. It is valuable and meaningful, therefore, to study SAR-based remote sensing applications. In recent years, deep learning represented by convolution neural networks has promoted significant progress in the computer vision community, e.g., in face recognition, the driverless field and Internet of things (IoT). Deep learning can enable computational models with multiple processing layers to learn data representations with multiple-level abstractions. This can greatly improve the performance of various applications. This reprint provides a platform for researchers to handle the above significant challenges and present their innovative and cutting-edge research results when applying deep learning to SAR in various manuscript types, e.g., articles, letters, reviews and technical reports

Computing Local Fractal Dimension Using Geographical Weighting Scheme

The fractal dimension (D) of a surface can be viewed as a summary or average statistic for characterizing the geometric complexity of that surface. The D values are useful for measuring the geometric complexity of various land cover types. Existing fractal methods only calculate a single D value for representing the whole surface. However, the geometric complexity of a surface varies across patches and a single D value is insufficient to capture these detailed variations. Previous studies have calculated local D values using a moving window technique. The main purpose of this study is to compute local D values using an alternative way by incorporating the geographical weighting scheme within the original global fractal methods. Three original fractal methods are selected in this study: the Triangular Prism method, the Differential Box Counting method and the Fourier Power Spectral Density method. A Gaussian density kernel function is used for the local adaption purpose and various bandwidths are tested. The first part of this dissertation research explores and compares both of the global and local D values of these three methods using test images. The D value is computed for every single pixel across the image to show the surface complexity variation. In the second part of the dissertation, the main goal is to study two major U.S. cities located in two regions. New York City and Houston are compared using D values for both of spatial and temporal comparison. The results show that the geographical weighting scheme is suitable for calculating local D values but very sensitive to small bandwidths. New York City and Houston show similar global D results for both year of 2000 and 2016 indicating there were not much land cover changes during the study period