Satellite Image Time Series Analysis Under Time Warping

Satellite Image Time Series are becoming increasingly available and will continue to do so in the coming years thanks to the launch of space missions which aim at providing a coverage of the Earth every few days with high spatial resolution. In the case of optical imagery, it will be possible to produce land use and cover change maps with detailed nomenclatures. However, due to meteorological phenomena, such as clouds, these time series will become irregular in terms of temporal sampling, and one will need to compare time series with different lengths. In this paper, we present an approach to image time series analysis which is able to deal with irregularly sampled series and which also allows the comparison of pairs of time series where each element of the pair has a different number of samples. We present the dynamic time warping from a theoretical point of view and illustrate its capabilities with two applications to real-time series.