Method and system for detecting sea-surface oil

Abstract

A behavioral recognition system may include both a computer vision engine and a machine learning engine configured to observe and learn patterns of behavior in video data. Certain embodiments may be configured to detect and evaluate the presence of sea-surface oil on the water surrounding an offshore oil platform. The computer vision engine may be configured to segment image data into detected patches or blobs of surface oil (foreground) present in the field of view of an infrared camera (or cameras). A machine learning engine may evaluate the detected patches of surface oil to learn to distinguish between sea-surface oil incident to the operation of an offshore platform and the appearance of surface oil that should be investigated by platform personnel.

What is claimed is: 
     
         1 . A computer-implemented method for analyzing a scene depicted in an input stream of video frames, the method comprising:
 for one or more of the video frames:
 identifying one or more foreground blobs in the video frames, wherein each foreground blob corresponds to one or more contiguous pixels of the video frame determined to depict sea-surface oil; and 
   evaluating the one or more foreground blobs to derive expected patterns of observations of sea-surface oil.