Modeling trajectory of dynamic clusters in image time-series for spatio-temporal reasoning

Abstract : During the last decades, satellites have acquired incessantly high resolution images of many Earth observation sites. New products have arisen from this intensive acquisition process : high resolution Satellite Image Time-Series (SITS). They represent a large data volume with a rich information content and may open a broad range of new applications. This article presents an information mining concept which enables a user to learn and retrieve spatio-temporal structures in SITS. The concept is based on a hierarchical Bayesian modeling of SITS information content which enables us to link the interest of a user to specific spatio-temporal structures. The hierarchy is composed of two inference steps : an unsupervised modeling of dynamic clusters resulting in a graph of trajectories, and an interactive learning procedure based on graphs which leads to the semantic labeling of spatio-temporal structures. Experiments performed on a SPOT image time-series demonstrate the concept capabilities.