A relative density ratio-based framework for detection of land cover changes in MODIS NDVI time series

To improve statistical approaches for near real-time land cover change detection in nonGaussian time-series data, we propose a supervised land cover change detection framework in which a MODIS NDVI time series is modeled as a triply modulated cosine function using the extended Kalman filter and the trend parameter of the triply modulated cosine function is used to derive repeated sequential probability ratio test (RSPRT) statistics. The statistics are based on relative density ratios estimated directly from the training set by a relative unconstrained least squares importance Fitting (RULSIF) algorithm, unlike traditional likelihood ratio-based test statistics. We test the framework on simulated, synthetic, and real-world beetle infestation datasets, and show that using estimated relative density ratios, instead of assuming the individual density functions to be Gaussian or approximating them with Gaussian Kernels, in the RSPRT statistics achieves better performance in terms of accuracy and detection delay. We verify the efficiency of the proposed approach by comparing its performance with three existing methods on all the three datasets under consideration in this study. We also propose a simple heuristic technique that tunes the threshold efficiently in difficult cases of near real-time change detection, when we need to take three performance indices, namely, false positives, false negatives, and mean detection delay, into account simultaneously.