Urban land cover analysis from satellite image time series based on temporal stability

Satellite Image Time Series (SITS) provide valuable information for the automatic mapping of our territories. In this article we focus on the analysis of urban land covers from SITS, trying to evaluate the density of artificialized areas. We hypothesize that such areas do not evolve significantly through time (over the interval of a year) compared to other non-artificialized areas (e.g., agricultural crops, vegetation). The proposed approach is based on a spatio-temporal characteristic measuring the temporal stability of a zone, extracted using the Run Length Encoding method. Preliminary results obtained on a series of 41 SENTINEL-2 images highlight the ability of our approach to discriminate different urban land-cover classes (e.g., artificial areas, high density vs. low density housing areas).