ENVISYS -- A solution for automatic oil spill detection in the Mediterranean
- Norwegian Computing Center, Oslo (Norway)
- IMPETUS, Athen (Greece)
The Mediterranean is a semi-enclosed basin heavily polluted by industrial outlets and spills from ships. Since the area is very fragile with strong environmental and commercial interests relying on clean water, a strong interest to protect the area has grown up. Intentional oil spills from ships washing their oil tanks is a significant problem in the Mediterranean. A promising technique for monitoring a large sea area for oil-spill early warning is by means of satellite SAR. ERS-1 and 2 have already been used for manual oil spill detection in North Europe for several years. With Radarsat and soon also ENVISAT, frequent satellite coverage of the Mediterranean will be possible. An European Union research project is currently developing a prototype system for automatic detection, verification, assessment and cleanup support. The prototype uses a feature extraction and classification scheme for the automatic detection. A design goal is to detect 98% of the oil slicks with a low rate of false alarms. Experiments so far indicate that it should be possible to reach this goal. An expected requirement for ships to record their route by a GPS system will in combination with automatic oil spill detection be a powerful tool to identify ships dumping oil. It is expected that such a system will have a significant preventive effect reducing intentional oil spills.
- OSTI ID:
- 478109
- Report Number(s):
- CONF-970319-; TRN: 97:002802-0002
- Resource Relation:
- Conference: 4. thematic international conference on remote sensing for marine and coastal environments: technology and applications, Orlando, FL (United States), 17-19 Mar 1997; Other Information: PBD: 1997; Related Information: Is Part Of Proceedings of the fourth international conference on remote sensing for marine and coastal environments. Technology and applications: Volume I; PB: 741 p.
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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