SPATIO-TEMPORAL REGIONS' SIMILARITY FRAMEWORK FOR VHR SATELLITE IMAGE TIME SERIES ANALYSIS

In remote sensing, temporal sequence of images called Satellite Image Time Series (SITS) covering the same scene allows land cover observation, understanding, analysis and monitoring. Nowadays, STIS are accessible with higher spatial and temporal resolution which hampers their interpretation. This paper presents a spatio-temporal regions' similarity framework using a novel matrix based on Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence measure. To this end, an explicit definition of a Spatio-Temporal Region (STR) is given in order to build its characteristic matrix called Multi-Temporal Region Matrix (MTRM). Afterwards, using this matrix, a Cross-STR Similarity Matrix (CSTRSM) is computed between STR of in order to reveal regions with similar temporal fingerprint. Experiments are carried out on synthesized and compared to previously presented approaches for STIS analysis.