Efficient temporal access of satellite image data

Abstract

A single tile from the gridded MODIS products, spanning a region of interest of approximately 10° by 10°, is stored as an image containing close to six million pixels, with data in multiple spectral bands for each pixel. Time series analyses of sequences of such images in order to perform automated change detection is a topic of growing importance. Traditional storage formats store such a series of images as a sequence of individual files, with each file internally storing the pixels in their spatial order. To construct a time series of a single pixel through time using such traditional storage solutions would require accessing hundreds of very large files, resulting in significant overheads which limit high-throughput analyses