ABSTRACT
This chapter gives a brief introduction to the oil spill and its role in the marine ecosystem. It discusses the processes that take place within the oil slick and its neighboring environment when it comes in contact with the water and surrounding ecosystem. The major oil spills in history and comparison of the frequency of larger and smaller oil spill incidents are also stated. Three decomposition models (Freeman–Durden, Yamaguchi 3-component, and Van Zyl decomposition) were applied to the UAVSAR dataset. The chapter studies the potential of SAR remote sensing decomposition techniques along with two supervised classifications: Wishart supervise classifier and support vector machine. The separability between the oil and water was calculated for each decomposition and dataset. Based on the separability analysis outcomes, different decomposition elements were fed to the supervised classifiers. Finally, the accuracy assessment was discussed for the estimated outputs. The role of remote sensing in detecting and monitoring oil spills, specifically synthetic aperture radar (SAR) is discussed to give a general idea about the studies that have been carried out in past.
