Modeling Trajectory of Dynamic Clusters in Image
Time-Series for Spatio-Temporal Reasoning

Patrick Héas and Mihai Datcu, Senior Member, IEEE

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 paper 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.

Index Terms - Bayesian modeling, dynamic cluster trajectories, information mining, semantic labeling, spatio-temporal learning.

.© 2005 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. However, permission to reprint/republish this material for advertising or promotional purposes or for creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or to reuse any copyrighted component of this work in other works must be obtained from the IEEE.