Classification of time series of multispectral images with limited training data

Image classification usually requires the availability of reliable reference data collected for the considered image to train supervised classifiers. Unfortunately when time series of images are considered, this is seldom possible because of the costs associated with reference data collection. In most of the applications it is realistic to have reference data available for one or few images of a time series acquired on the area of interest. In this paper, we present a novel system for automatically classifying image time series that takes advantage of image(s) with an associated reference information (i.e., the source domain) to classify image(s) for which reference information is not available (i.e., the target domain). The proposed system exploits the already available knowledge on the source domain and, when possible, integrates it with a minimum amount of new labeled data for the target domain. In addition, it is able to handle possible significant differences between statistical distributions of the source and target domains. Here, the method is presented in the context of classification of remote sensing image time series, where ground reference data collection is a highly critical and demanding task. Experimental results show the effectiveness of the proposed technique. The method can work on multimodal (e.g., multispectral) images.