Image Time-Series Data Mining Based on the Information-Bottleneck Principle

Satellite image time series (SITS) consist of a time sequence of high-resolution spatial data. SITS may contain valuable information, but it may be deeply hidden. This paper addresses the problem of extracting relevant information from SITS based on the information-bottleneck principle. The method depends on suitable model selection, coupled with a rate-distortion analysis for determining the optimal number of clusters. We present how to use this method with the Gauss-Markov random fields and the autobinomial random fields model families in order to characterize the spatio-temporal structures contained in SITS. Experimental results on synthetic data and SITS from SPOT demonstrate the performance of the proposed methodology