Detection and Evaluation of Oil Spills by Optical Methods

Detection and Evaluation of Oil Spills by Optical Methods

Rui Vilar (1), Sergey Babichenko (2), Luisa Bastos (3), Jesús Torres Palenzuela (4), Julio Martín-Herrero (4), Andrei Borissovitch Utkin (1), Alexander Lavrov (1),
(1) INOV, Lisbon, Portugal
(2) Laser Diagnostic Instruments AS, Tallinn, Estonia
(3) Centro Interdisciplinar de Investigação Marinha e Ambiental, Porto, Portugal
(4) University of Vigo, Spain

The project "Detection and Evaluation of Oil Spills by Optical Methods" was started in October 2008 within the framework of AMPERA (European Coordination Action to Foster Prevention and Best Response to Accidental Marine Pollution) initiative in response to the increasing risk of water pollution by accidental or criminal oil spillage due to the ever-growing traffic of cargo ships in European ports, navigable rivers, channels and coastal waters.
Protection against oil spillage includes three levels of surveillance: 1) satellite-borne (range about 50 to 200 km), 2) airborne inspection by visual analysis and IR/UV sensors (range about 100 to 500 m) and 3) waterborne.
During the last 25 years, the attention of scientists and engineers concentrated mainly on the development of detection methods and equipment for the first and second levels of surveillance. A number of active and passive optical methods were developed, mainly sophisticated and costly long-range instruments. As a result, almost no techniques suitable for the third level of surveillance - one of the most important, due to its flexibility and lower cost - are available in this moment. In particular, the need for lightweight, low-cost detectors that can be widely used for watercraft borne as well as airborne coastal inspection remains unmet.
In this project, we intend to develop a low cost, efficient system for the third level of surveillance, which may be installed on watercraft and used for intensive surveillance of harborages, rivers, channels, and coastal waters. Specific objectives of the project are:
• Characterising the spectral signatures of crude oils and other hydrocarbons from various sources using laser induced fluorescence and passive imaging spectroscopy;
• Developing a low cost nanometre-spectral-range fluorescence lidar for early detection of oil spills in riverine and coastal waters and measurement of the hydrocarbon film thickness;
• Creating artificial intelligence algorithms for automatic oil identification and tracing using this instrument;
• Developing a dedicated low-cost direct geo-referencing system (GPS/GNSS+IMU) adequate to oil spillage mapping. This will foster the applicability of the oil spill detection system by allowing the organisation of acquired data for direct use in a GIS environment;
• Testing and optimising of the inspection system in laboratory and field tests carried out in Tagus river estuary and Atlantic Ocean coastal waters;
• Benchmarking of the fluorescence lidar developed in the project against more sophisticated well established techniques, in particular a 308 nm fluorescence lidar FLS-A and the on-line Spectral Fluorescence Signatures (SFS) analyzer Fluo-Imager previously developed by project partner LDI;
• Development of calibration and verification procedures of the lidar findings based on the SFS technology in order to achieve more reliable detection, characterization and mapping of oil spills.
The consortium includes several public and private institutions and companies with a large experience in remote surveillance by remote and on-line contact methods, each with extensive knowledge and experience in complementary areas crucial to the project success: INOV, Portugal (lidar and LIF/LIDAR, telecommunications, image analysis, and video data fusion), Laser Diagnostic Instruments AS - LDI, Estonia (oil spill detection by LIF lidar and SFS technology), CIIMAR, Portugal (georeferencing) and the University of Vigo, Spain (remote-surveillance data fusion).
The project will result in the development of a low cost portable and modular system for automatic oil spill detection, based on inexpensive LIF/LIDAR detectors, but able to combine LIF/LIDAR data with GPS/GNSS+IMU data to produce an accurate localisation, characterisation and mapping of hydrocarbon pollutant films on water.