Automatic identification of oil spills on satellite images Iphigenia Keramitsoglou a, * , Constantinos Cartalis a , Chris T. Kiranoudis b a Remote Sensing and Image Processing Team, Department of Applied Physics, University of Athens, Panepistimioupolis, Build PHYS-V, Athens GR-15784, Greece b Department of Process Analysis and Systems Design, School of Chemical Engineering, National Technical University, Zografou Campus, Athens GR-15780, Greece Received 22 May 2004; received in revised form 11 November 2004; accepted 27 November 2004 Available online 6 February 2005 Abstract A fully automated system for the identification of possible oil spills present on Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) satellite images based on artificial intelligence fuzzy logic has been developed. Oil spills are recognized by experts as dark patterns of characteristic shape, in particular context. The system analyzes the satellite images and assigns the probability of a dark image shape to be an oil spill. The output consists of several images and tables providing the user with all relevant information for decision-making. The case study area was the Aegean Sea in Greece. The system responded very satisfactorily for all 35 images processed. The complete algorithmic procedure was coded in MS Visual CCC 6.0 in a stand-alone dynamic link library (dll) to be linked with any sort of application under any variant of MS Windows operating system. Ó 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Keywords: Oil spills; SAR; Remote sensing; Sea surface; Marine pollution; Fuzzy logic Software availability Name of software: Oil Spill SAR detector Developer: Chris T. Kiranoudis, Assistant Professor, Department of Process Analysis and Systems Design, School of Chemical Engineering, Na- tional Technical University, Zografou Campus, Athens GR-15780, Greece. E-mail: kyr@che- meng.ntua.gr Hardware required: any PC configuration Software required: MS Windows Program language: MS Visual CCC 6.0 Program size: 10 MB 1. Introduction Environmental protection is currently an important subject of increasing public concern and as a result, particular attention is being paid to the environmental damage caused by the creation of spills of hydrocarbon compounds over the sea surface created as a result of oil-tanker accidents or illegal cleaning of tankers. A successful combating operation to a marine oil spill depends on the rapid response from the time the oil spill is detected. In fact, the concept of oil spill contingency planning refers to several activities for developing an immediate response program and undeniably the most important one is oil spill detection (Assilzadeh and Mansor, 2001). In fact, several studies have already been reported on oil spill contingency planning (Uthe, 1992; Monk and Cormack, 1992; Theophilopoulos et al., * Corresponding author. Tel.: C30 210 727 6843; fax: C30 210 727 6774. E-mail address: ikeram@cc.uoa.gr (I. Keramitsoglou). 1364-8152/$ - see front matter Ó 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.envsoft.2004.11.010 Environmental Modelling & Software 21 (2006) 640–652 www.elsevier.com/locate/envsoft