Modification of fractal algorithm for oil spill detection from RADARSAT-1 SAR data

This paper introduces amodified formula for the fractal box counting dimension. Themethod is based on utilization of the probability distribution formula in the fractal box count. The purpose of this method is to use it for the discrimination of oil spill areas from the surrounding features, e.g., sea surface and lookalikes in RADARSAT-1 SAR Wide beam mode (W1) and Standard beam mode (S2) data have been collected under different wind speeds. The results show that the new formula of the fractal box counting dimension is able to discriminate between oil spills, look-alike areas and pixels of the size of a single ship. TheW1mode data illustrate an error standard deviation of 0.05, thus performing a better discrimination of oil spills as compared to S2mode data. We conclude that automatic detection and discrimination of oil spill and other sea surface features can be opertionalized by using the new formula for fractal box