Engineering-grade monitoring of floating-roof oil tanks using amplitude-only TerraSAR-X imagery and dual geometric pipelines

Floating-roof oil tanks provide a geometric proxy for petroleum storage, but engineering-grade monitoring is challenged by safety constraints and optical imagery limitations. This study proposes an automated framework for monitoring floating-roof oil tanks using single-date, amplitude-only TerraSAR-X imagery. Two complementary pipelines are developed: a rule-based approach integrating speckle suppression, dual-ellipse normalization, and Hough-based arc fitting to extract tank dimensions under SAR distortion; and a U-Net semantic segmentation pipeline delineating tank regions without predefined shape assumptions. Validation against multi-temporal manual SAR-derived reference measurement demonstrates high repeatability, consistent agreement with manual SAR-derived reference measurements, and stable boundary localization under complex scattering. Both pipelines capture physically consistent floating-roof height variations. The results confirm that amplitude-only TerraSAR-X imagery supports reliable, all-weather monitoring and provides a scalable foundation for future multi-sensor SAR systems.