Oil Spill

Early detection of oil spills at sea enables faster response and reduces environmental damage.

Sensor: SAR (C-band or X-band).

Pipeline:

• Collect: SAR image over monitored shipping lanes or offshore platforms.
• Map: detect dark spots on ocean surface (oil dampens capillary waves, reducing SAR backscatter). Apply adaptive threshold relative to surrounding sea state.
• Reduce: classify dark spots by shape (elongated = likely spill, circular = natural slick/low-wind zone). Filter by area (> minimum spill size). Generate alert with spill extent estimate.

Alert payload: ~2 KB (centroid, estimated area km^2, elongation ratio, heading, wind speed context, timestamp).

Feasibility:

• Dark-spot detection in SAR is computationally cheap (thresholding + connected components).
• False positive discrimination (oil vs lookalikes like algae, low-wind zones) is the hard part; simple shape heuristics help, ML-based classifiers need more compute.
• No baseline needed — each image is self-contained.