Statistical Analysis of Changes in Sentinel-1 Time Series on the Google Earth Engine

Morton John Canty, Allan Aasbjerg Nielsen, Henning Skriver, Knut Conradsen

AbstractTime series analysis of preprocessed Sentinel-1 SAR imagery made available by the Google Earth Engine (GEE) is described. Advantage is taken of a recent modification of a sequential complex Wishart-based algorithm which is applicable to the polarimetric intensity data archived on the GEE. Both the algorithm and a software interface to the GEE Python API for convenient data exploration and analysis are presented; the latter can be run from a platform independent Docker container and the source code is available on GitHub. Application examples are given involving the monitoring of anthropogenic activity and disaster assessment. These highlight the advantages of the good temporal resolution resulting from cloud cover independence, short revisit times and near real time data availability.
Keywordsdual polarization SAR; change detection; flood monitoring; deforestation; port activity; uranium mining; Google Earth Engine; Python; Jupyter notebook
TypeJournal paper [With referee]
JournalRemote Sensing
Year2020    Month January    Vol. 12    No. 1    pp. 46
NotePublished electronically on 20 Dec 2019
Electronic version(s)[pdf]
Publication linkhttp://doi.org/10.3390/rs12010046
BibTeX data [bibtex]
IMM Group(s)Image Analysis & Computer Graphics