A novel spatio-temporal change detection approach using hyper-temporal satellite data

The use of hyper-temporal MODIS time-series data for the detection of land cover change in South Africa has been an active research area the last few year. This paper expands on previous studies that show that this type of data can be effectively used in the detection of new informal settlements in South Africa. In this paper, the feasibility of using the temporal evolution of the distribution of MODIS reflectance values within a pixel neighborhood to detect land cover change is evaluated. More specifically, the covariance at each time point is evaluated for a specific pixel neighborhood and MODIS band combination and the temporal evolution of the Mahalanobis distance (between each pixel’s reflectance value and the reflection distribution of the neighborhood) is calculated. The feasibility of using this derived time-series to detect land cover change was evaluated. Preliminary results indicate that using this derived time-series as opposed to the raw reflection time-series to do land cover change detection reduces false alarms in the order of 7% while maintaining above 90% accuracy.