Dense Satellite Image Time Series Analysis: Opportunities, Challenges, and Future Directions

Earth observation satellites provide important data for monitoring land surface dynamics. In recent years, with the development of new satellite constellations, supercomputing, artificial intelligence, and cloud computing, remote sensing studies of land surface changes have been gradually shifted from sparse time series analysis to dense time series anslysis. Dense satellite image time series dramatically improve our capability for capturing frequent changes in the land surface. It has changed the research questions, data processing techniques, and applications compared with the traditional sparse time series analysis. This chapter discussed the opportunities, challenges, and future directions of dense satellite time series data analysis. It can help researchers from the remote sensing community or other disciplines apply dense satellite time series analysis to solve real-world problems.