Synthetic Aperture Radar Oil Spill Segmentation by Stochastic Complexity Minimization

Abstract

We present a new algorithm for oil spill segmentation in synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images, using the minimum description length (MDL) principle and a polygonal active grid. This algorithm is based on two steps: a first partitioning step into homogeneous regions and a second classification step with an automatic MDL thresholding. The obtained method allows one to segment the different candidate oil spills in an image automatically and in a few seconds.