Construction of smooth daily remote sensing time series data: a higher spatiotemporal resolution perspective

Research in time-series remote sensing data is receiving increasing attention. With the availability of relatively short repeat cycle and high spatial resolution satellite data, the construction and application of high spatiotemporal remote sensing time-series data is promising. In this paper, we proposed a method to construct complete spatial time series data, with Savitzky-Golay filter for smoothing and locally-adaptive linear interpolation for generating daily NDVI imagery. An IDL-based program was developed to achieve this goal. The China’s HJ-1 A/B satellite data were employed for this remote sensing time series construction. The results demonstrated that: (1) This method can generate smooth continuous time series image data successfully based on irregularly short-revisit remote sensing data; (2) HJ-1 A/B NDVI time-series were demonstrated to be successful in monitoring crop phenology and hyperspectral analysis was successfully applied on HJ-1 A/B time-series data to perform temporal endmember extraction. The IDL-based time-series construction program is generalizable for various kind of multi-temporal remote sensing data such as MODIS vegetation-index product. Discussion and concluding remarks are made to reveal the authors’ perspective on higher spatial resolution time-series analysis in the remote sensing community.