Neural networks for oil spill detection using ERS-SAR data

Abstract—A neural network approach for semi-automatic de-tection of oil spills in European remote sensing satellite-synthetic aperture radar (ERS-SAR) imagery is presented. The network input is a vector containing the values of a set of features char-acterizing an oil spill candidate. The classification performance of the algorithm has been evaluated on a data set containing verified examples of oil spill and look-alike. A direct analysis of the information content of the calculated features has been also carried out through an extended pruning procedure of the net. Index Terms—ERS-synthetic aperture radar (SAR), neural net-works, oil spill detection. I