Practical implementation of vectorization of oil spills detected at sea on SAR image

Vectorization is one of the useful functions in image data processing especially for the integration of remote sensing and GIS purpose where raster data is converted to vector format for later analysis. There is a lot of vectorization algorithm published already in the international journals. However, the problem is still in interest and there could be some improvements from implementation point of view. In the oil spill detection at sea by SAR image data, at the end the detected oil spills are needed to be converted to vector format for shape analysis and overlay over based map in GIS environment. The authors developed quite useful algorithm which was implemented as one step of a semi-automated oil spill detection system OilDetect 1.0. In this paper the authors will describe the algorithm including software implementation. Results are demonstrated with ALOS PALSAR data over the Vietnam sea region. After vectorization, the boundaries of oil spill are archived in ArcGIS shape file formats for easy integration into database which is already in ArcGIS environment.