Kongsberg Satellite Services (KSAT) has an operational oil spill detection service that is based on manual inspection of radar satellite images. The oil spills need to be detected within 30 minutes after the image was captured by the satellite. KSAT has its own downlink stations (located at Tromsø, Svalbard and Antarctica), and is currently reading radar images from Radarsat-2 and Envisat ASAR.

Due to an increasing number of scenes that need to be analysed, KSAT needs to automate the oil spill detection service. An automatic oil spill detection algorithm needs to be relatively fast, needs to flag all suspicious slicks in the images, and, preferrably, assign some confidence value to each detected slick. The number of false alarms should be kept at a minimum, while at the same time, ideally, no true oil slicks should be missing.