A Latent Analysis of Earth Surface Dynamic Evolution Using Change Map Time Series

With a continuous increase in the number of Earth Observation satellites, leading to the development of satellite image time series (SITS), the number of algorithms for land cover analysis and monitoring has greatly expanded. This paper offers a new perspective in dynamic classification for SITS. Four similarity measures (correlation coefficient, Kullback–Leibler divergence, conditional information, and normalized compression distance) based on consecutive image pairs from the data are employed. These measures employ linear dependences, statistical measures, and spatial relationships to compute radiometric, spectral, and texture changes that offer a description for the multitemporal behavior of the SITS. During this process, the original SITS is converted to a change map time series (CMTS), which removes the static information from the data set. The CMTS is analyzed using a latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) model capable of discovering classes with semantic meaning based on the latent information hidden in the scene. This statistical method was originally used for text classification, thus requiring a word, document, corpus analogy with the elements inside the image. The experimental results were computed using 11 Landsat images over the city of Bucharest and surrounding areas. The LDA model enables us to discover a wide range of scene evolution classes based on the various dynamic behaviors of the land cover. The results are compared with the Corinne Land Cover map. However, this is not a validation method but one that adds static knowledge about the general usage of the analyzed area. In order to help the interpretation of the results, we use several studies on forms of relief, weather forecast, and very high resolution images that can explain the wide range of structures responsible for influencing the dynamic inside the resolution cell.