This paper uses a signal separation method called Robust Principal Component Analysis (RPCA) as a pre-processing technique to improve the classification of oil rigs in Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) images. After the pre-processing method, features are extracted from the images using the VGG-16 convolutional neural network. These features guide classification through Support Vector Machine (SVM), Neural Networks, and Logistic Regression algorithms. The experiments used SAR images from the Sentinel-1 system, C-band, and VH polarization. Early results highlight that preprocessing improves classification accuracy compared to conventional methods. © VDE VERLAG GMBH ∙ Berlin ∙ Offenbach.