A new look at the old sea oil slick observation problem: Opportunities and pitfalls of SAR polarimetry

In this study, polarimetric Synthetic Aperture Radar (pol-SAR) features are derived from full-, dual- and compact-polarimetric SAR measurements and their performance is investigated for sea oil slick observation purposes. Experiments undertaken on a RadarSAT-2 SAR scene collected over well-known oil slicks show that all the polSAR architectures allow correctly emphasizing oil slicks with respect to the surrounding sea. Full-pol and compact-pol SAR architectures allow detecting oil slicks without any adaptive thresholding, the latter is needed when dealing with dual-pol (co-co) SAR measurements. As a matter of fact, the key pitfall of pol-SAR, i.e. its limited swath, can be successfully overcame by compact-polarimetric architecture that, with respect to sea oil slick observation, exhibits performance similar to full-polarimetric SAR.