Robust Oil-spill Forensics and Petroleum Source Differentiation using Quantized Peak Topography Maps

Abstract

Identification and classification of environmental forensics, with the petroleum forensics as the main application, requires an effective technology or method to distinguish between the closely located forensics as they share many main biomarkers. Two-dimensional gas chromatography is one of these technologies with which a petroleum forensic is separated into its chemical compounds, resulting in a three-dimensional image, GCXGC image. Therefore, distinguishing between two petroleum forensics is equivalent to the comparison between their corresponding GCXGC images. In this paper, we present a technique, called Quantized Peak Topography Map (QPTM), which results in a better separation between the GCXGC images. We validate our proposed method on a model dataset, consisting of thirtyfour GCXGC images, extracted from the different parts of the world.