Spatial-feature data cube for spatiotemporal remote sensing data processing and analysis

With the rapid development in Earth observation technology, a variety of satellite sensors have provided large and open sets of remote sensing data. However, traditional methods of analysis are no longer available for time-serial remote sensing data analysis that typically handles multidimensional spatio-temporal data models. Moreover, researchers have found it trivial and tedious to obtain ready-to-analyze data for Earth science models from regular Earth observation data. For an easy and efficient time-serial remote sensing data analysis, a spatial-featured data cube analysis tool based on multidimensional data model is proposed for time-serial remote sensing data processing and analysis. For the performance consideration, a distributed execution engine was also used for efficient implementation of large-scale tasks in parallel. Finally, through experiments on both normalized difference vegetation index product and water detection within a 20-year period, we confirmed that our approach is efficient and scalable for a long time-series analysis.