Development and evaluation of satellite image data analysis infrastructure

Tokyo University of Information Sciences (TUIS) receives moderate resolution imaging spectroradiometer (MODIS) data, and provides the processed data to universities and research institutes as part of the academic frontier project. One of the major fields of research using MODIS data is the analysis of changes in the environment. We are currently developing applications to analyze environmental changes. These applications run on our satellite image data analysis system, which is implemented in a parallel distributed system and a database server. When using satellite data, one common problem is the interference of clouds. In order to remove this interference, the standard solution is to create composite data of the same regions during a selected time span, and to patch together data which are not covered by clouds to create a clear image. We introduced a piece-processing algorithm which separates one set of satellite image data into many small pieces of image data, making it quicker and easier to analyze and process the time-series satellite data. In this research, we implemented the piece-processing and composite-processing algorithms in order to increase the speed of analysis within the satellite image database. We tested the proposed processing and verified its effectiveness for target applications.