Abstract
Multitemporal hyperspectral images are gaining an ever-increasing importance revealed by the ambition of the remote sensing community to develop new generation of sensors. Therefore, multitemporal images classification and change detection issues are greatly relevant in several research topics. In this paper, we propose a novel approach for modeling the temporal variation of the reflectance response as a function of time period and wavelength; summarizing the spectral signature of hyperspectral pixels as a 3-D mesh. This approach is adopted for hyperspectral time series analysis leading to the main following contribution: an advanced form of the temporal spectral signature defining the reflectance at each pixel as a congregation of the spatial/spectral/temporal dimensions. Afterward, by formulating the temporal data set in an adequate multidimensional feature space of contextual data, an innovative processing scheme exploiting the theoretical backgrounds of 3-D surface reconstruction and matching is adopted for data interpretation. Finally, an improved method for multitemporal endmember extraction and spectral unmixing based on multilinear algebra methods is introduced. A case study, in a region located in southern Tunisia, is conducted on a multitemporal subset of Hyperion images. Up to 89.86% of sampling sites have been correctly predicted by the proposed approach, outperforming conventional classifiers. The good performances obtained, on simulated multitemporal images and over various real experimental scenarios, illustrate the effectiveness and the generalization capacities of the proposed approach.