Geospatial Image Stream Processing: Models, techniques, and applications in remote sensing change detection

Detection of changes in environmental phenomena using remotely sensed data is a major requirement in the Earth sciences, especially in natural disaster related scenarios where real-time detection plays a crucial role in the saving of human lives and the preservation of natural resources.;Recognizing the necessity for a systematic effort to address the above issues, the work presented in this thesis is a concrete step toward the foundation and construction of an integrated Geospatial Image Stream Processing framework, GISP. First, we present a data and metadata model for remotely sensed image streams. We introduce a precise characterization of images and image streams in the context of remotely sensed geospatial data. On this foundation, we define spatially-aware temporal operators with a consistent semantics for change analysis tasks. We address the change detection problem in settings where multiple image stream sources are available, and thus we introduce an architectural design for the processing of geospatial image streams from multiple sources. With the aim of targeting collaborative scientific environments, we construct a realization of our architecture based on Kepler, a robust and widely used scientific workflow management system, as the underlying computational support; and open data and Web interface standards, as a means to facilitate the interoperability of GISP instances with other processing infrastructures and client applications. We demonstrate our GISP framework with representative remote sensing applications including land cover detection, wildfire detection, and near real-time validation of surface temperature measurements integrating ground- and satellite-based data.;Although various approaches formulated to model multidimensional data can in principle be applied to the inherent complexity of remotely sensed geospatial data, there are still challenging peculiarities that demand a precise characterization in the context of change detection, particularly in scenarios of fast changes. In the same vein, geospatial image streams do not fit appropriately in the standard Data Stream Management System (DSMS) approach because these systems mainly deal with tuple-based streams.