Dual-polarized Sar Data for Oil Spill Detection

In this study the capability of the co-polarized phase difference (CPD) for oil spill observation has been investigated. A simple and effective filtering technique, based on the standard deviation (σ) of the CPD Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) image, has been implemented. First experiment, accomplished over SIR-C/X-SAR C-Band data, have shown different sensitivity of the filtering technique with respect to oil spills and biogenic oil lookalikes. Since this technique needs only HH and VV data it can be applied also on dual-polarized data such as those provided by the ASAR operated on board on the ENVISAT satellite and the forthcoming COSMOSKYMED.