Automated image processing for remote sensing data classification

Remote sensing technologies allow for continuous and valuable monitoring of the Earth's various environments. In particular, coastal and ocean monitoring presents an intrinsic complexity that makes such monitoring the main source of information available. Oceans, being the largest but least observed habitat, have many different factors affecting theirs faunal variations. Enhancing the capabilities to monitor and understand the changes occurring allows us to perform predictions and adopt proper decisions. This paper proposes an automated classification tool to recognise specific marine mesoscale events. Typically, human experts monitor and analyse these events visually through remote sensing imagery, specifically addressing Sea Surface Temperature data. The extended availability of this kind of remote sensing data transforms this activity into a time-consuming and subjective interpretation of the information. For this reason, there is an increased need for automated or at least semi-automated tools to perform this task. The results presented in this work have been obtained by applying the proposed approach to images captured over the southwestern region of the Iberian Peninsula.