Monitoring of Oil Tank Filling With Spaceborne SAR Using Coherent Scatterers

Abstract

In this paper a new method is introduced for the automatic estimation of all the relevant parameters of oil storage tanks using a single high resolution SAR image. For a given storage tank, this method will estimate its maximum capacity and determine whether it has a fixed or a floating roof. For tanks with a floating roof, the amount of oil stored will also be estimated. If a SAR time series is available all the images can be processed jointly, exploiting the available temporal information to provide more accurate and robust estimates than those obtained from each individual image. The dimensions of each storage tank are derived from its semicircular double reflections, which are detected using the coherent scatterers in the SAR image. The classification between tanks with fixed and floating roofs is performed with a simple machine learning classifier using just three features related to the detected semicircular double reflections. The performance of the proposed method using a single image and a time series is evaluated with three TerraSAR-X images of the port of Rotterdam, containing 167 oil storage tanks of different sizes and with both fixed and floating roofs.

Enhancing SAR Multipath Ghost Image Suppression for Complex Structures through Multi-Aspect Observation

“…This method performs low-rank and sparse decomposition on the matrix composed of sequence images, and it can effectively suppress multipath ghost images while retaining the target signal. The PCA method can detect multipath pixels, but it causes The image intensity is calculated as follows: (13) where there are Q pixels in the selected area and A i represents the amplitude value of the i-th pixel.…”

“…Zhang [9][10][11], Horst [12], Carlos [13], Xu [14], and others analyzed the multipath scattering mechanism of oil tanks. The scattering characteristics of oil tanks in SAR images were analyzed in [9], which also set up a scattering model of oil tanks.…”

“…Also, the multipath scattering characteristics of oil tanks and the causes of multipath scattering are analyzed in detail. Studies of oil tank SAR images and analyses of the scattering characteristics of oil tanks were also conducted in [13,14]. The multiple reflections produced by the oil tank's outside wall are also taken into account in [14].…”

Automatic Monitoring of Oil Tank 3D Geometry and Storage Changes With Interferometric Coherence and SAR Intensity Information

“…As mentioned in [10], by exploiting the SAR scattering mechanism, more details in the vertical structure of oil tanks can be extracted compared to optical sensors. Nonetheless, previous SAR-based oil tank extraction studies demonstrate the following limitations: (1) requiring external data, e.g., optical images [11,12], (2) utilizing poor-resolution SAR images (resolution > 2 m) [9,13], (3) demanding oil tank geometry information, e.g., radius and height [13] and locations [14], (4) involving manual selection of backscattering points [15,16], (5) relying on nearby land features, e.g., T-shaped harbor [9], or (6) consuming extensive processing time and computation power [2,14]. These limitations greatly hinder their methods' universal applicability, especially in regions with many oil tanks, but no ground truth data is available.…”

“…On the other hand, because most oil tanks contain volatile oil products with a vapor pressure of less than 11.1 Pisa [17], their roofs are generally designed to float rather than be fixed to reduce the vapor space [18]. Therefore, by exploiting scattering feature points of floating roofs on SAR images, it is feasible to estimate oil tanks' storage changes, as simulated in [15] and demonstrated in [14]. Nonetheless, many recent studies only extract oil tanks' locations and spatial distributions [9,11, > REPLACE THIS LINE WITH YOUR MANUSCRIPT ID NUMBER (DOUBLE-CLICK HERE TO EDIT) < 21].…”