Satellite Image Time Series (SITS) have recently been of great interest due to the emerging remote sensing capabilities for Earth observation. Trend and seasonal components are two crucial elements of SITS. In this paper, a novel framework of SITS decomposition based on Ensemble Empirical Mode Decomposition (EEMD) is proposed. EEMD is achieved by sifting an ensemble of adaptive orthogonal components called Intrinsic Mode Functions (IMFs). EEMD is noise-assisted and overcomes the drawback of mode mixing in conventional Empirical Mode Decomposition (EMD). Inspired by these advantages, the aim of this work is to employ EEMD to decompose SITS into IMFs and to choose relevant IMFs for the separation of seasonal and trend components. In a series of simulations, IMFs extracted by EEMD achieved a clear representation with physical meaning. The experimental results of 16-day compositions of Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS), Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), and Global Environment Monitoring Index (GEMI) time series with disturbance illustrated the effectiveness and stability of the proposed approach to monitoring tasks, such as applications for the detection of abrupt changes.

In this paper, we propose a novel method to continuously monitor land cover change using satellite image time series, which can extract comprehensive change information including change time, location, and “from-to” information. This method is based on a hidden Markov model (HMM) trained for each land cover class. Assuming a pixel’s initial class has been obtained, likelihoods of the corresponding model are calculated on incoming time series extracted with a temporal sliding window. By observing the likelihood change over the windows, land cover change can be precisely detected from the dramatic drop of likelihood. The established HMMs are then used for identifying the land cover class after the change. As a case study, the proposed method is applied to monitoring urban encroachment onto farmland in Beijing using 10-year MODIS time series from 2001 to 2010. The performance is evaluated on a validation set for different model structures and thresholds. Compared with other change detection methods, the proposed method shows superior change detection accuracy. In addition, it is also more computationally efficient.

Fire detection based on multi-temporal remote sensing data is an active research field. However, multi-temporal detection processes are usually complicated because of the spatial and temporal variability of remote sensing imagery. This paper presents a spatio-temporal model (STM) based forest fire detection method that uses multiple images of the inspected scene. In STM, the strong correlation between an inspected pixel and its neighboring pixels is considered, which can mitigate adverse impacts of spatial heterogeneity on background intensity predictions. The integration of spatial contextual information and temporal information makes it a more robust model for anomaly detection. The proposed algorithm was applied to a forest fire in 2009 in the Yinanhe forest, Heilongjiang province, China, using two-month HJ-1B infrared camera sensor (IRS) images. A comparison of detection results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm described in this paper are useful to represent the spatio-temporal information contained in multi-temporal remotely sensed data, and the STM detection method can be used to obtain a higher detection accuracy than the optimized contextual algorithm.