The reserve volume of oil tanks can be obtained through in-depth analysis of satellite images. This approach addresses the urgent demand for precise and rapid acquisition of global oil tank reserves. A novel method for extracting oil tank shadows based on projection characteristics of a cylinder was proposed that extracts the shadows obscured by the oil tank’s side wall under complex observation angles. A preprocessed satellite image was used to extract the oil tank shadow via arc feature extraction, Hough transform, and an edge detection algorithm. Subsequently, a reserve identification model for oil tanks based on geometric projection and shadow boundary extraction was constructed. This model used the parallel projection characteristics of satellite imaging and combined the geometric structure of the oil tank to infer the shadow length by the geometric relationship between the extreme points of the shadow boundary and the tank centers. The oil tank height was then accurately determined, and finally, the reserve was identified using height difference and tank radius. The proposed method was validated through the establishment of a tank experimental system and the application of an oil tank case study from the United Arab Emirates. The research results show that the method exhibited high accuracy and reliability. Through multiple sets of tank experiments, the proposed method yielded a relative error range of 0.49% to 2.14% in identifying the reserve of the tank model. To further verify its accuracy, the method was applied to the 18# oil tank at Jebel Dhanna Port, yielding a relative error of 0.44% in volume identification.
Li et al. (Thu,) studied this question.