Constrained Distance Based K-Means Clustering for Satellite Image Time-Series

International audienceThe advent of high-resolution instruments for time-series sampling poses added complexity for the formal definition of thematic classes in the remote sensing domain-required by supervised methods-while unsupervised methods ignore expert knowledge and intuition. Constrained clustering is becoming an increasingly popular approach in data mining because it offers a solution to these problems, however, its application in remote sensing is relatively unknown. This article addresses this divide by adapting publicly available k-Means constrained clustering implementations to use the dynamic time warping (DTW) dissimilarity measure, which is thought to be more appropriate for time-series analysis. Adding constraints to the clustering problem increases accuracy when compared to unconstrained clustering. The output of such algorithms are homogeneous in spatially defined regions