On the classification of mixed floating pollutants on the Yellow Sea of China by using a quad-polarized SAR image

Abstract

This study explored different methodologies using a C-band RADARSAT-2 quad-polarized Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) image located over China’s Yellow Sea to investigate polarization decomposition parameters for identifying mixed floating pollutants from a complex ocean background. It was found that solitary polarization decomposition did not meet the demand for detecting and classifying multiple floating pollutants, even after applying a polarized SAR image. Furthermore, considering that Yamaguchi decomposition is sensitive to vegetation and the algal variety Enteromorpha prolifera, while H/A/alpha decomposition is sensitive to oil spills, a combination of parameters which was deduced from these two decompositions was proposed for marine environmental monitoring of mixed floating sea surface pollutants. A combination of volume scattering, surface scattering, and scattering entropy was the best indicator for classifying mixed floating pollutants from a complex ocean background. The Kappa coefficients for Enteromorpha prolifera and oil spills were 0.7514 and 0.8470, respectively, evidence that the composite polarized parameters based on quad-polarized SAR imagery proposed in this research is an effective monitoring method for complex marine pollution.

Keywords

RADARSAT-2 / polarization decomposition / mixed floating pollutants / classification

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Acknowledgments

The authors gratefully acknowledge financial support from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 41301500, 41431174, and 61471358). This paper was partly sponsored by a Funding of Scholarship from the Chinese Academy of Sciences. The authors would also like to acknowledge on-site teamwork by Dr Juan Wang et al. of the North China Sea Environmental Monitoring Center, State Oceanic Administration.

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