Oil spills on the water surface: methods of remote sensing data analysis for their identification

High rate of scale & space distribution of the damage done to the natural environment dictate the need for ultra-fast detection of World Ocean’s oil pollution. The article discusses various methods for oil spills detection on the water surface by processing remote sensing data obtained by different satellite systems: active (Sentinel-1 [IW]) and passive (multispectral images: medium resolution Landsat-8 [OLI], Sentinel-2 [MSI] and high-resolution PlanetScope). The results of enhancement and thematic image processing by automated interpretation methods, such as threshold filteringof the quality assessment channel (Landsat-8: Collection 1 Level-1), radar image’ speckle filtering, estimation of in-dexes and supervised classification based on spectral signatures are presented.