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Analysis of Multi-temporal Remote Sensing Images
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Analysis of Multi-temporal Remote Sensing Images

A special issue of Remote Sensing (ISSN 2072-4292). This special issue belongs to the section "Remote Sensing Image Processing".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (31 October 2018) | Viewed by 113333

Special Issue Editors

Dr. Francesca Bovolo

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Fondazione Bruno Kessler, Università degli Studi di Trento, 38122 Trento Area, Italy
Interests: time series analysis; multitemporal image processing; change detection; multitemporal data fusion; multitemporal classification and domain adaptation; trend analysis; regression analysis; damage assessment
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Dr. Giampaolo Ferraioli

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Department of Science and Technology, University of Naples “Parthenope”, Centro Direzionale Isola C4, 80143 Naples, Italy
Interests: synthetic aperture radar (SAR); SAR interferometry; changing detection; despeckling; denoising; edge detection; SAR tomography
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Prof. Dr. Turgay Celik

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
1. School of Computer Science and Applied Mathematics, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg 2000, South Africa
2. School of Information Science and Technology, Southwest Jiaotong University, Chengdu, China
Interests: signal/image/video processing; visual computing; machine learning; cognitive computing; remote sensing data modelling and processing
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Nowadays, the amount and availability of multitemporal images are experiencing a fast increase. This is due to the increasing number of space missions, the increases in data temporal resolution, as well as to the free access data policy adopted for missions like Landsat and Sentinel. In this context, there is room for the development of both novel methodologies and applications for image time series employment. This Special Issue on “Analysis of Multi-Temporal Remote Sensing Images” aims at publishing sound work improving the state-of-the-art in the following (but not exclusively) aspects of multitemporal information extraction: multitemporal images pre-processing (calibration, correction and registration techniques); multitemporal data harmonization, multitemporal image/time series analysis (classification, trend analysis, regression); mining in multitemporal data/time series; change detection; multitemporal data fusion; validation approaches for multi-temporal data analysis; etc. Any kind of data (optical passive sensor images, active SAR images, low to VHR resolution images, multi- to hyper-spectral data, multi-to hyper temporal data) can be considered, as well as any kind of application (climate change; agriculture, cryosphere, biodiversity, land-cover and -use dynamics, forestry, disaster/damage assessment, etc.).

Dr. Francesca Bovolo
Dr. Giampaolo Ferraioli
Prof. Turgay Celik
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

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Keywords

  • time series analysis,
  • multitemporal image processing/classification,
  • change detection and damage assessment,
  • multitemporal data fusion,
  • domain adaptation,
  • trend analysis,
  • regression analysis,
  • biophysical parameter estimation
  • big data in temporal data analysis

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Published Papers (16 papers)

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Research

22 pages, 7360 KiB  
Article
Joint SAR Image Time Series and PSInSAR Data Analytics: An LDA Based Approach
by Corina Văduva, Cosmin Dănișor and Mihai Datcu
Remote Sens. 2018, 10(9), 1436; https://doi.org/10.3390/rs10091436 - 8 Sep 2018
Cited by 5 | Viewed by 4494
Abstract
Due to the constant increase in Earth Observation (EO) data collections, the monitoring of land cover is facilitated by the temporal diversity of the satellite images datasets. Due to the capacity of Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) sensors to operate independently of sunlight and [...] Read more.
Due to the constant increase in Earth Observation (EO) data collections, the monitoring of land cover is facilitated by the temporal diversity of the satellite images datasets. Due to the capacity of Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) sensors to operate independently of sunlight and weather conditions, SAR image time series offer the possibility to form a dataset with almost regular temporal sampling. This paper aims at mining the SAR image time series for an analysis of target’s behavior from the perspective of both temporal evolution and coherence. The authors present a two-level analytical approach envisaging the assessment of global (related to perceivable structures on the ground) and local (related to changes occurred within a perceivable structure on the ground) evolution inside the scene. The Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) model is implemented to identify the categories of evolution present in the analyzed scene, while the statistical and coherent proprieties of the dataset’s images are exploited in order to identify the structures with stable electromagnetic response, the so-called Persistent Scatterers (PS). A comparative study of the two algorithms’ classification results is conducted on ERS and Sentinel-1 data. At global scale, the results fit human perception, as most of the points which can be exploited for Persistent Scatterers Interferometry (PS-InSAR) are classified within the same class, referring to stable structures. At local scale, the LDA classification demands for an extended number of classes (defined through a perplexity-based analysis), enabling further differentiation inside the evolutional character of those stable structures. The comparison against the map of detected PS reveals which classes present higher temporal correlation, determining a stable evolutionary character, opening new perspectives for validation of both PS detection and SITS analysis algorithms. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Analysis of Multi-temporal Remote Sensing Images)
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21 pages, 16068 KiB  
Article
A Speckle Filtering Method Based on Hypothesis Testing for Time-Series SAR Images
by Jili Yuan, Xiaolei Lv and Rui Li
Remote Sens. 2018, 10(9), 1383; https://doi.org/10.3390/rs10091383 - 30 Aug 2018
Cited by 21 | Viewed by 5938
Abstract
To improve the suppression effect for the speckle noise of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images and the ability of spatiotemporal information preservation of the filtered image without losing the spatial resolution, a novel multitemporal filtering method based on hypothesis testing is proposed in [...] Read more.
To improve the suppression effect for the speckle noise of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images and the ability of spatiotemporal information preservation of the filtered image without losing the spatial resolution, a novel multitemporal filtering method based on hypothesis testing is proposed in this paper. A framework of a two-step similarity measure strategy is adopted to further enhance the filtering results. Firstly, bi-date analysis using a two-sample Kolmogorov-Smirnov (KS) test is conducted in step 1 to extract homogeneous patches for 3-D patch stacks generation. Subsequently, the similarity between patch stacks is compared by a sliding time-series likelihood ratio (STSLR) test algorithm in step 2, which utilizes the multi-dimensional data structure of the stacks to improve the accuracy of unchanged pixels detection. Finally, the filtered values are obtained by averaging the similar pixels in time-series. The experimental results and analysis of two multitemporal datasets acquired by TerraSAR-X show that the proposed method outperforms the other typical methods with regard to the overall filtering effect, especially in terms of the consistency between the filtered images and the original ones. Furthermore, the performance of the proposed method is also discussed by analyzing the results from step 1 and step 2. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Analysis of Multi-temporal Remote Sensing Images)
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19 pages, 5287 KiB  
Article
A Spatial-Temporal Adaptive Neighborhood-Based Ratio Approach for Change Detection in SAR Images
by Huifu Zhuang, Hongdong Fan, Kazhong Deng and Guobiao Yao
Remote Sens. 2018, 10(8), 1295; https://doi.org/10.3390/rs10081295 - 16 Aug 2018
Cited by 16 | Viewed by 3874
Abstract
The neighborhood-based method was proposed and widely used in the change detection of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images because the neighborhood information of SAR images is effective to reduce the negative effect of speckle noise. Nevertheless, for the neighborhood-based method, it is unreasonable [...] Read more.
The neighborhood-based method was proposed and widely used in the change detection of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images because the neighborhood information of SAR images is effective to reduce the negative effect of speckle noise. Nevertheless, for the neighborhood-based method, it is unreasonable to use a fixed window size for the entire image because the optimal window size of different pixels in an image is different. Hence, if you let the neighborhood-based method use a large window to significantly suppress noise, it cannot preserve the detail information such as the edge of a changed area. To overcome this drawback, we propose a spatial-temporal adaptive neighborhood-based ratio (STANR) approach for change detection in SAR images. STANR employs heterogeneity to adaptively select the spatial homogeneity neighborhood and uses the temporal adaptive strategy to determine multi-temporal neighborhood windows. Experimental results on two data sets show that STANR can both suppress the negative influence of noise and preserve edge details, and can obtain a better difference image than other state-of-the-art methods. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Analysis of Multi-temporal Remote Sensing Images)
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17 pages, 18993 KiB  
Article
Single-Polarized SAR Classification Based on a Multi-Temporal Image Stack
by Keng-Fan Lin and Daniele Perissin
Remote Sens. 2018, 10(7), 1087; https://doi.org/10.3390/rs10071087 - 8 Jul 2018
Cited by 7 | Viewed by 3813
Abstract
Land cover classification plays a pivotal role in Earth resource management. In the past, synthetic aperture radar (SAR) had been extensively studied for classification. However, limited work has been done on multi-temporal datasets owing to the lack of data availability and computational power. [...] Read more.
Land cover classification plays a pivotal role in Earth resource management. In the past, synthetic aperture radar (SAR) had been extensively studied for classification. However, limited work has been done on multi-temporal datasets owing to the lack of data availability and computational power. As Earth observation (EO) becomes more and more imperative, it becomes essential to exploit the information embedded in multi-temporal datasets. In this paper, we present a framework for SAR pixel labeling. Specifically, we exploit spatio-temporal information for pixel labeling. The proposed scheme includes four steps: (1) extraction of spatio-temporal observations; (2) feature computation; (3) feature reduction and (4) pixel labeling. First, an adaptive approach is applied to the data cube to extract spatio-temporal observations in both coherent and incoherent domains. Second, features in distinct domains are designed and computed to boost information content embedded in the multi-temporal datasets. Third, sequential feature selection is utilized for selecting the most discriminative features among the entire feature space. Last, the discriminative classifier is used to label the class of each pixel. By integrating pixel-/object-based processing techniques, spatial/temporal observations and coherent/incoherent data attributes, the proposed method explores diverse observations to solve complex labeling problems. In the experiments, we apply the proposed method on 64 TanDEM-X images and 70 COSMO-SkyMed high-resolution images, respectively. Both experiments reveal high accuracies for multi-class labeling. The proposed technique, therefore, provides a new solution for classifying multi-temporal single-polarized datasets. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Analysis of Multi-temporal Remote Sensing Images)
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21 pages, 31481 KiB  
Article
A Comparison between Standard and Functional Clustering Methodologies: Application to Agricultural Fields for Yield Pattern Assessment
by Simone Pascucci, Maria Francesca Carfora, Angelo Palombo, Stefano Pignatti, Raffaele Casa, Monica Pepe and Fabio Castaldi
Remote Sens. 2018, 10(4), 585; https://doi.org/10.3390/rs10040585 - 10 Apr 2018
Cited by 17 | Viewed by 5360
Abstract
The recognition of spatial patterns within agricultural fields, presenting similar yield potential areas, stable through time, is very important for optimizing agricultural practices. This study proposes the evaluation of different clustering methodologies applied to multispectral satellite time series for retrieving temporally stable (constant) [...] Read more.
The recognition of spatial patterns within agricultural fields, presenting similar yield potential areas, stable through time, is very important for optimizing agricultural practices. This study proposes the evaluation of different clustering methodologies applied to multispectral satellite time series for retrieving temporally stable (constant) patterns in agricultural fields, related to within-field yield spatial distribution. The ability of different clustering procedures for the recognition and mapping of constant patterns in fields of cereal crops was assessed. Crop vigor patterns, considered to be related to soils characteristics, and possibly indicative of yield potential, were derived by applying the different clustering algorithms to time series of Landsat images acquired on 94 agricultural fields near Rome (Italy). Two different approaches were applied and validated using Landsat 7 and 8 archived imagery. The first approach automatically extracts and calculates for each field of interest (FOI) the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), then exploits the standard K-means clustering algorithm to derive constant patterns at the field level. The second approach applies novel clustering procedures directly to spectral reflectance time series, in particular: (1) standard K-means; (2) functional K-means; (3) multivariate functional principal components clustering analysis; (4) hierarchical clustering. The different approaches were validated through cluster accuracy estimates on a reference set of FOIs for which yield maps were available for some years. Results show that multivariate functional principal components clustering, with an a priori determination of the optimal number of classes for each FOI, provides a better accuracy than those of standard clustering algorithms. The proposed novel functional clustering methodologies are effective and efficient for constant pattern retrieval and can be used for a sustainable management of agricultural fields, depending on farming systems and environmental conditions in different regions. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Analysis of Multi-temporal Remote Sensing Images)
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23 pages, 64871 KiB  
Article
An Approach for Unsupervised Change Detection in Multitemporal VHR Images Acquired by Different Multispectral Sensors
by Yady Tatiana Solano-Correa, Francesca Bovolo and Lorenzo Bruzzone
Remote Sens. 2018, 10(4), 533; https://doi.org/10.3390/rs10040533 - 30 Mar 2018
Cited by 50 | Viewed by 7299
Abstract
This paper proposes an approach for the detection of changes in multitemporal Very High Resolution (VHR) optical images acquired by different multispectral sensors. The proposed approach, which is inspired by a recent framework developed to support the design of change-detection systems for single-sensor [...] Read more.
This paper proposes an approach for the detection of changes in multitemporal Very High Resolution (VHR) optical images acquired by different multispectral sensors. The proposed approach, which is inspired by a recent framework developed to support the design of change-detection systems for single-sensor VHR remote sensing images, addresses and integrates in the general approach a strategy to effectively deal with multisensor information, i.e., to perform change detection between VHR images acquired by different multispectral sensors on two dates. This is achieved by the definition of procedures for the homogenization of radiometric, spectral and geometric image properties. These procedures map images into a common feature space where the information acquired by different multispectral sensors becomes comparable across time. Although the approach is general, here we optimize it for the detection of changes in vegetation and urban areas by employing features based on linear transformations (Tasseled Caps and Orthogonal Equations), which are shown to be effective for representing the multisensor information in a homogeneous physical way irrespectively of the considered sensor. Experiments on multitemporal images acquired by different VHR satellite systems (i.e., QuickBird, WorldView-2 and GeoEye-1) confirm the effectiveness of the proposed approach. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Analysis of Multi-temporal Remote Sensing Images)
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19 pages, 7789 KiB  
Article
Monitoring Quarry Area with Landsat Long Time-Series for Socioeconomic Study
by Haoteng Zhao, Yong Ma, Fu Chen, Jianbo Liu, Liyuan Jiang, Wutao Yao and Jin Yang
Remote Sens. 2018, 10(4), 517; https://doi.org/10.3390/rs10040517 - 26 Mar 2018
Cited by 10 | Viewed by 7375
Abstract
Quarry sites result from human activity, which includes the removal of original vegetation and the overlying soil to dig out stones for building use. Therefore, the dynamics of the quarry area provide a unique view of human mining activities. Actually, the topographic changes [...] Read more.
Quarry sites result from human activity, which includes the removal of original vegetation and the overlying soil to dig out stones for building use. Therefore, the dynamics of the quarry area provide a unique view of human mining activities. Actually, the topographic changes caused by mining activities are also a result of the development of the local economy. Thus, monitoring the quarry area can provide information about the policies of the economy and environmental protection. In this paper, we developed a combined method of machine learning classification and quarry region analysis to estimate the quarry area in a quarry region near Beijing. A temporal smoothing based on the classification results of all years was applied in post-processing to remove outliers and obtain gently changing sequences along the monitoring term. The method was applied to Landsat images to derive a quarry distribution map and quarry area time series from 1984 to 2017, revealing significant inter-annual variability. The time series revealed a five-stage development of the quarry area with different growth patterns. As the study region lies on two jurisdictions—Tianjin and Hebei—a comparison of the quarry area changes in the two jurisdictions was applied, which revealed that the different policies in the two regions could impose different impacts on the development of a quarry area. An analysis concerning the relationship between quarry area and gross regional product (GRP) was performed to explore the potential application on socioeconomic studies, and we found a strong positive correlation between quarry area and GRP in Langfang City, Hebei Province. These results demonstrate the potential benefit of annual monitoring over the long-term for socioeconomic studies, which can be used for mining decision making. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Analysis of Multi-temporal Remote Sensing Images)
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19 pages, 6621 KiB  
Article
Post-Processing Approach for Refining Raw Land Cover Change Detection of Very High-Resolution Remote Sensing Images
by Zhiyong Lv, Tongfei Liu, Yiliang Wan, Jón Atli Benediktsson and Xiaokang Zhang
Remote Sens. 2018, 10(3), 472; https://doi.org/10.3390/rs10030472 - 17 Mar 2018
Cited by 46 | Viewed by 8735
Abstract
In recent decades, land cover change detection (LCCD) using very high-spatial resolution (VHR) remote sensing images has been a major research topic. However, VHR remote sensing images usually lead to a large amount of noises in spectra, thereby reducing the reliability of the [...] Read more.
In recent decades, land cover change detection (LCCD) using very high-spatial resolution (VHR) remote sensing images has been a major research topic. However, VHR remote sensing images usually lead to a large amount of noises in spectra, thereby reducing the reliability of the detected results. To solve this problem, this study proposes an object-based expectation maximization (OBEM) post-processing approach for enhancing raw LCCD results. OBEM defines a refinement of the labeling in a detected map to enhance its raw detection accuracies. Current mainstream change detection (preprocessing) techniques concentrate on proposing a change magnitude measurement or considering image spatial features to obtain a change detection map. The proposed OBEM approach is a new solution to enhance change detection accuracy by refining the raw result. Post-processing approaches can achieve competitive accuracies to the preprocessing methods, but in a direct and succinct manner. The proposed OBEM post-processing method synthetically considers multi-scale segmentation and expectation maximum algorithms to refine the raw change detection result. Then, the influence of the scale of segmentation on the LCCD accuracy of the proposed OBEM is investigated. Four pairs of remote sensing images, one of two pairs (aerial image with 0.5 m/pixel resolution) which depict two landslide sites on Landtau Island, Hong Kong, China, are used in the experiments to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed approach. In addition, the proposed approach is applied, and validated by two case studies, LCCD in Tianjin City China (SPOT-5 satellite image with 2.5 m/pixel resolution) and Mexico forest fire case (Landsat TM images with 30 m/pixel resolution), respectively. Quantitative evaluations show that the proposed OBEM post-processing approach can achieve better performance and higher accuracies than several commonly used preprocessing methods. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this type of post-processing framework is first proposed here for the field of LCCD using VHR remote sensing images. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Analysis of Multi-temporal Remote Sensing Images)
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23 pages, 14148 KiB  
Article
Unified Partial Configuration Model Framework for Fast Partially Occluded Object Detection in High-Resolution Remote Sensing Images
by Shaohua Qiu, Gongjian Wen, Jia Liu, Zhipeng Deng and Yaxiang Fan
Remote Sens. 2018, 10(3), 464; https://doi.org/10.3390/rs10030464 - 15 Mar 2018
Cited by 12 | Viewed by 5060
Abstract
Partially occluded object detection (POOD) has been an important task for both civil and military applications that use high-resolution remote sensing images (HR-RSIs). This topic is very challenging due to the limited object evidence for detection. Recent partial configuration model (PCM) based methods [...] Read more.
Partially occluded object detection (POOD) has been an important task for both civil and military applications that use high-resolution remote sensing images (HR-RSIs). This topic is very challenging due to the limited object evidence for detection. Recent partial configuration model (PCM) based methods deal with occlusion yet suffer from the problems of massive manual annotation, separate parameter learning, and low training and detection efficiency. To tackle this, a unified PCM framework (UniPCM) is proposed in this paper. The proposed UniPCM adopts a part sharing mechanism which directly shares the root and part filters of a deformable part-based model (DPM) among different partial configurations. It largely reduces the convolution overhead during both training and detection. In UniPCM, a novel DPM deformation deviation method is proposed for spatial interrelationship estimation of PCM, and a unified weights learning method is presented to simultaneously obtain the weights of elements within each partial configuration and the weights between partial configurations. Experiments on three HR-RSI datasets show that the proposed UniPCM method achieves a much higher training and detection efficiency for POOD compared with state-of-the-art PCM-based methods, while maintaining a comparable detection accuracy. UniPCM obtains a training speedup of maximal 10× and 2.5× for airplane and ship, and a detection speedup of maximal 7.2×, 4.1× and 2.5× on three test sets, respectively. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Analysis of Multi-temporal Remote Sensing Images)
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16 pages, 5634 KiB  
Article
Improving the Quality of Satellite Imagery Based on Ground-Truth Data from Rain Gauge Stations
by Ana F. Militino, M. Dolores Ugarte and Unai Pérez-Goya
Remote Sens. 2018, 10(3), 398; https://doi.org/10.3390/rs10030398 - 5 Mar 2018
Cited by 3 | Viewed by 6531
Abstract
Multitemporal imagery is by and large geometrically and radiometrically accurate, but the residual noise arising from removal clouds and other atmospheric and electronic effects can produce outliers that must be mitigated to properly exploit the remote sensing information. In this study, we show [...] Read more.
Multitemporal imagery is by and large geometrically and radiometrically accurate, but the residual noise arising from removal clouds and other atmospheric and electronic effects can produce outliers that must be mitigated to properly exploit the remote sensing information. In this study, we show how ground-truth data from rain gauge stations can improve the quality of satellite imagery. To this end, a simulation study is conducted wherein different sizes of outlier outbreaks are spread and randomly introduced in the normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) and the day and night land surface temperature (LST) of composite images from Navarre (Spain) between 2011 and 2015. To remove outliers, a new method called thin-plate splines with covariates (TpsWc) is proposed. This method consists of smoothing the median anomalies with a thin-plate spline model, whereby transformed ground-truth data are the external covariates of the model. The performance of the proposed method is measured with the square root of the mean square error (RMSE), calculated as the root of the pixel-by-pixel mean square differences between the original data and the predicted data with the TpsWc model and with a state-space model with and without covariates. The study shows that the use of ground-truth data reduces the RMSE in both the TpsWc model and the state-space model used for comparison purposes. The new method successfully removes the abnormal data while preserving the phenology of the raw data. The RMSE reduction percentage varies according to the derived variables (NDVI or LST), but reductions of up to 20% are achieved with the new proposal. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Analysis of Multi-temporal Remote Sensing Images)
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14 pages, 6744 KiB  
Article
Object-Based Change Detection in Urban Areas from High Spatial Resolution Images Based on Multiple Features and Ensemble Learning
by Xin Wang, Sicong Liu, Peijun Du, Hao Liang, Junshi Xia and Yunfeng Li
Remote Sens. 2018, 10(2), 276; https://doi.org/10.3390/rs10020276 - 11 Feb 2018
Cited by 104 | Viewed by 8630
Abstract
To improve the accuracy of change detection in urban areas using bi-temporal high-resolution remote sensing images, a novel object-based change detection scheme combining multiple features and ensemble learning is proposed in this paper. Image segmentation is conducted to determine the objects in bi-temporal [...] Read more.
To improve the accuracy of change detection in urban areas using bi-temporal high-resolution remote sensing images, a novel object-based change detection scheme combining multiple features and ensemble learning is proposed in this paper. Image segmentation is conducted to determine the objects in bi-temporal images separately. Subsequently, three kinds of object features, i.e., spectral, shape and texture, are extracted. Using the image differencing process, a difference image is generated and used as the input for nonlinear supervised classifiers, including k-nearest neighbor, support vector machine, extreme learning machine and random forest. Finally, the results of multiple classifiers are integrated using an ensemble rule called weighted voting to generate the final change detection result. Experimental results of two pairs of real high-resolution remote sensing datasets demonstrate that the proposed approach outperforms the traditional methods in terms of overall accuracy and generates change detection maps with a higher number of homogeneous regions in urban areas. Moreover, the influences of segmentation scale and the feature selection strategy on the change detection performance are also analyzed and discussed. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Analysis of Multi-temporal Remote Sensing Images)
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30 pages, 27407 KiB  
Article
Flood Extent Mapping from Time-Series SAR Images Based on Texture Analysis and Data Fusion
by Moslem Ouled Sghaier, Imen Hammami, Samuel Foucher and Richard Lepage
Remote Sens. 2018, 10(2), 237; https://doi.org/10.3390/rs10020237 - 4 Feb 2018
Cited by 58 | Viewed by 10883
Abstract
Nowadays, satellite images are considered as one of the most relevant sources of information in the context of major disasters management. Their availability in extreme weather conditions and their ability to cover wide geographic areas make them an indispensable tool toward an effective [...] Read more.
Nowadays, satellite images are considered as one of the most relevant sources of information in the context of major disasters management. Their availability in extreme weather conditions and their ability to cover wide geographic areas make them an indispensable tool toward an effective disaster response. Among the various available sensors, Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) is distinguished in the context of flood management by its ability to penetrate cloud cover and its robustness to unfavourable weather conditions. This work aims at developing a new technique for flooded areas extraction from high resolution time-series SAR images. The proposed approach is mainly based on three steps: first, homogeneous regions characterizing water surfaces are extracted from each SAR image using a local texture descriptor. Then, mathematical morphology is applied to filter tiny artifacts and small homogeneous areas present in the image. And finally, spatial and radiometric information embedded in each pixel are extracted and are fused with the same pixel information but from another image to decide if the current pixel belongs to a flooded region. In order to assess the performance of the proposed algorithm, our methodology was applied to time-series images acquired before and during three different flooding events: (1) Richelieu River and lake Champlain floods, Quebec, Canada in 2011; (2) Evros River floods, Greece in 2014 and (3) Western and southwestern of Iran floods in 2016. Experiments show that our approach gives very promising results compared to existing techniques. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Analysis of Multi-temporal Remote Sensing Images)
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Graphical abstract

23 pages, 18958 KiB  
Article
Atmospheric and Radiometric Correction Algorithms for the Multitemporal Assessment of Grasslands Productivity
by Jesús A. Prieto-Amparan, Federico Villarreal-Guerrero, Martin Martinez-Salvador, Carlos Manjarrez-Domínguez, Eduardo Santellano-Estrada and Alfredo Pinedo-Alvarez
Remote Sens. 2018, 10(2), 219; https://doi.org/10.3390/rs10020219 - 1 Feb 2018
Cited by 37 | Viewed by 11418
Abstract
A key step in the processing of satellite imagery is the radiometric correction of images to account for reflectance that water vapor, atmospheric dust, and other atmospheric elements add to the images, causing imprecisions in variables of interest estimated at the earth’s surface [...] Read more.
A key step in the processing of satellite imagery is the radiometric correction of images to account for reflectance that water vapor, atmospheric dust, and other atmospheric elements add to the images, causing imprecisions in variables of interest estimated at the earth’s surface level. That issue is important when performing spatiotemporal analyses to determine ecosystems’ productivity. In this study, three correction methods were applied to satellite images for the period 2010–2014. These methods were Atmospheric Correction for Flat Terrain 2 (ATCOR2), Fast Line-of-Sight Atmospheric Analysis of Spectral Hypercubes (FLAASH), and Dark Object Substract 1 (DOS1). The images included 12 sub-scenes from the Landsat Thematic Mapper (TM) and the Operational Land Imager (OLI) sensors. The images corresponded to three Permanent Monitoring Sites (PMS) of grasslands, ‘Teseachi’, ‘Eden’, and ‘El Sitio’, located in the state of Chihuahua, Mexico. After the corrections were applied to the images, they were evaluated in terms of their precision for biomass estimation. For that, biomass production was measured during the study period at the three PMS to calibrate production models developed with simple and multiple linear regression (SLR and MLR) techniques. When the estimations were made with MLR, DOS1 obtained an R2 of 0.97 (p < 0.05) for 2012 and values greater than 0.70 (p < 0.05) during 2013–2014. The rest of the algorithms did not show significant results and DOS1, which is the simplest algorithm, resulted in the best biomass estimator. Thus, in the multitemporal analysis of grassland based on spectral information, it is not necessary to apply complex correction procedures. The maps of biomass production, elaborated from images corrected with DOS1, can be used as a reference point for the assessment of the grassland condition, as well as to determine the grazing capacity and thus the potential animal production in such ecosystems. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Analysis of Multi-temporal Remote Sensing Images)
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Article
Improved Co-Registration of Sentinel-2 and Landsat-8 Imagery for Earth Surface Motion Measurements
by André Stumpf, David Michéa and Jean-Philippe Malet
Remote Sens. 2018, 10(2), 160; https://doi.org/10.3390/rs10020160 - 23 Jan 2018
Cited by 77 | Viewed by 8911
Abstract
The constellation of Landsat-8 and Sentinel-2 optical satellites offers opportunities for a wide range of Earth Observation (EO) applications and scientific studies in Earth sciences mainly related to geohazards. The multi-temporal co-registration accuracy of images provided by both missions is, however, currently not [...] Read more.
The constellation of Landsat-8 and Sentinel-2 optical satellites offers opportunities for a wide range of Earth Observation (EO) applications and scientific studies in Earth sciences mainly related to geohazards. The multi-temporal co-registration accuracy of images provided by both missions is, however, currently not fully satisfactory for change detection, time-series analysis and in particular Earth surface motion measurements. The objective of this work is the development, implementation and test of an automatic processing chain for correcting co-registration artefacts targeting accurate alignment of Sentinel-2 and Landsat-8 imagery for time series analysis. The method relies on dense sub-pixel offset measurements and robust statistics to correct for systematic offsets and striping artefacts. Experimental evaluation at sites with diverse environmental settings is conducted to evaluate the efficiency of the processing chain in comparison with previously proposed routines. The experimental evaluation suggests lower residual offsets than existing methods ranging between R M S E x y = 2.30 and 2.91 m remaining stable for longer time series. A first case study demonstrates the utility of the processor for the monitoring of continuously active landslides. A second case study demonstrates the use of the processor for measuring co-seismic surface displacements indicating an accuracy of 1/5 th of a pixel after corrections and 1/10th of a pixel after calibration with ground measurements. The implemented processing chain is available as an open source tool to support a better exploitation of the growing archives of Sentinel-2 and Landsat-8. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Analysis of Multi-temporal Remote Sensing Images)
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18 pages, 18290 KiB  
Article
Using a MODIS Index to Quantify MODIS-AVHRRs Spectral Differences in the Visible Band
by Xingwang Fan and Yuanbo Liu
Remote Sens. 2018, 10(1), 61; https://doi.org/10.3390/rs10010061 - 4 Jan 2018
Cited by 5 | Viewed by 4844
Abstract
Spectral band differences are a critical issue for progressing into an integrated earth observation framework and in particular, in sensor intercalibration. The differences are currently normalized using spectral band adjustment factor (SBAF) that is generated from hyperspectral data. In this context, the current [...] Read more.
Spectral band differences are a critical issue for progressing into an integrated earth observation framework and in particular, in sensor intercalibration. The differences are currently normalized using spectral band adjustment factor (SBAF) that is generated from hyperspectral data. In this context, the current study proposes a method for calculating moderate-resolution imaging spectroradiometer (MODIS)-advanced very high resolution radiometers (AVHRRs) SBAF in the visible band, using the MODIS surface reflectance data. The method involves a uniform ratio index calculated using the MODIS 552-nm and 645-nm bands, and a sensor-specific quadratic equation, producing SBAF data at 500-m spatial resolution. The calculated SBAFs are in good agreement at site scale with literature reported data (relative error < 1.0%), and at local scale with Hyperion-derived data (total uncertainty ≈ 0.001), and significantly improve MODIS-AVHRR surface reflectance data consistency in the visible band (better than 1.0% reflectance units). The calculation is more sensitive to atmospheric effects over the vegetated areas. At global scale, MODIS-AVHRRs SBAFs are generally large (>1.0) over densely vegetated areas and extremely low over deserts and barren lands (0.96–0.98), indicative of large MODIS-AVHRRs differences. Deserts show temporally stable SBAF values, while still suffer from intra-annual BRDF effects and short-term cloud contamination. By means of daily MODIS data, the proposed method can produce ongoing SBAF data at a spatial scale that is comparable to AVHRRs. It increases the sampling of MODIS-AVHRRs image pairs for intercalibration, and offers insight into spectral band conversion, finally contributing to an integrated earth observation at moderate spatial resolutions. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Analysis of Multi-temporal Remote Sensing Images)
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Article
Multi-Temporal Analysis of Forestry and Coastal Environments Using UASs
by Luís Pádua, Jonáš Hruška, José Bessa, Telmo Adão, Luís M. Martins, José A. Gonçalves, Emanuel Peres, António M. R. Sousa, João P. Castro and Joaquim J. Sousa
Remote Sens. 2018, 10(1), 24; https://doi.org/10.3390/rs10010024 - 24 Dec 2017
Cited by 34 | Viewed by 6724
Abstract
Due to strong improvements and developments achieved in the last decade, it is clear that applied research using remote sensing technology such as unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) can provide a flexible, efficient, non-destructive, and non-invasive means of acquiring geoscientific data, especially aerial imagery. [...] Read more.
Due to strong improvements and developments achieved in the last decade, it is clear that applied research using remote sensing technology such as unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) can provide a flexible, efficient, non-destructive, and non-invasive means of acquiring geoscientific data, especially aerial imagery. Simultaneously, there has been an exponential increase in the development of sensors and instruments that can be installed in UAV platforms. By combining the aforementioned factors, unmanned aerial system (UAS) setups composed of UAVs, sensors, and ground control stations, have been increasingly used for remote sensing applications, with growing potential and abilities. This paper’s overall goal is to identify advantages and challenges related to the use of UAVs for aerial imagery acquisition in forestry and coastal environments for preservation/prevention contexts. Moreover, the importance of monitoring these environments over time will be demonstrated. To achieve these goals, two case studies using UASs were conducted. The first focuses on phytosanitary problem detection and monitoring of chestnut tree health (Padrela region, Valpaços, Portugal). The acquired high-resolution imagery allowed for the identification of tree canopy cover decline by means of multi-temporal analysis. The second case study enabled the rigorous and non-evasive registry process of topographic changes that occurred in the sandspit of Cabedelo (Douro estuary, Porto, Portugal) in different time periods. The obtained results allow us to conclude that the UAS constitutes a low-cost, rigorous, and fairly autonomous form of remote sensing technology, capable of covering large geographical areas and acquiring high precision data to aid decision support systems in forestry preservation and coastal monitoring applications. Its swift evolution makes it a potential big player in remote sensing technologies today and in the near future. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Analysis of Multi-temporal Remote Sensing Images)
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