A Simple Similarity Index for the Comparison of Remotely Sensed Time Series with Scarce Simultaneous Acquisitions

Emergence of new state-of-the-art technologies has enabled an unprecedented amount of high spatial resolution satellite data having great potential for exploitation of extracted time series for a vast range of applications. Despite the high temporal resolution of time series, the number of real observations of optical data that can be utilized is reduced due to meteorological conditions (such as cloud or haze) prevailing at the time of acquisition. This fact has an effect on the density of the retrieved time series and subsequently on a number of coincidental observations when comparing the similarity of time series from two different data sources for which the simultaneous acquisition date is already scarce. Classical tools for assessing the similarity of such time series can prove to be difficult or even impossible because of a lack of simultaneous observations. In this paper, we propose a simple method in order to circumvent this scarcity issue. In the first step, we rely on an interpolation in order to produce artificial time series on the union of the original acquisition dates. Then, we extend the theory of the correlation coefficient (CC) estimator to these interpolated time series. After validation on synthetic data, this simple approach proved to be extremely efficient on a real case study where Sentinel-2 and PlanetScope NDVI time series on parcels in The Netherlands are compared. Indeed, compared to other methods, it reduced the number of undecided cases while also improving the power of the statistical test on the similarity between both types of time series and the precision of the estimated CC.