ENVISYS - A remote sensing system for detection of oil spills in the Mediterranean. Presented at the 16th EARSeL Symposium, Integrated Applications for Risk Assessment and Disaster Prevention for the Mediterranean, Malta, 20-23 May 1996

The Mediterranean Sea is a fragile ecological and economic area with with frequent oil pollution,
both intentional and accidental. An EU financed project has undertaken the task to develop a demonstrator
for a remote sensing system to detect and monitor oil spills and possibly other large-scale environmental
emergency situations. The system will include automatic screening of SAR imagery for oil spill detection
building on an algorithm developed previously to the project. The algorithm has three main parts: (i) detection
of dark spots; (ii) feature extraction; and (iii) dark spot classification. If a dark spot has been classified as
an oil slick, an alarm sounds and an operator has to inspect the probable oil slick manually. The initial results from SAR image screening experiments have shown that the concept of automatic detection is very promising, however, it has to be refined. This will be one of task undertaken by the ENVISYS project.