Oil spills detection through a marine environment monitoring system

The ability to detect and monitor oil spills at sea is becoming more and more important due to the high demand of oil based products and to the increase in maritime traffic density. Remote sensing frameworks have been proved to yield accurate results in the case of major events; nonetheless also medium and micro oil spills are of their own importance, especially in protected areas that deserve special attention. In this paper, we propose a monitoring framework based on the collection of in-situ observations and on their integration with remote sensing in order to fill out existing observational gaps. A risk assessment model is included for providing environmental decision support and for generating alerts in case of potentially dangerous situations. Field operational tests in an area of great environmental interest demonstrate the technical validity of the approach.