An Aligned Multi-Temporal Multi-Resolution Satellite Image Dataset for Change Detection Research

TL;DR

This paper introduces MuRA-T, an aligned multi-temporal, multi-resolution satellite image dataset designed to enhance change detection research by fusing data from multiple satellites with spatial and temporal alignment.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel dataset, MuRA-T, created by augmenting SpaceNet-7 with temporally aligned Landsat and Sentinel images, and introduces the MuRA framework for precise spatial alignment across satellites.

Findings

The dataset enables improved change detection by fusing multi-resolution satellite images.

MuRA framework effectively aligns high- and low-resolution satellite images.

The dataset covers 60 AOIs with minimal cloud cover for training purposes.

Abstract

This paper presents an aligned multi-temporal and multi-resolution satellite image dataset for research in change detection. We expect our dataset to be useful to researchers who want to fuse information from multiple satellites for detecting changes on the surface of the earth that may not be fully visible in any single satellite. The dataset we present was created by augmenting the SpaceNet-7 dataset with temporally parallel stacks of Landsat and Sentinel images. The SpaceNet-7 dataset consists of time-sequenced Planet images recorded over 101 AOIs (Areas-of-Interest). In our dataset, for each of the 60 AOIs that are meant for training, we augment the Planet datacube with temporally parallel datacubes of Landsat and Sentinel images. The temporal alignments between the high-res Planet images, on the one hand, and the Landsat and Sentinel images, on the other, are approximate since the temporal resolution for the Planet images is one month -- each image being a mosaic of the best data collected over a month. Whenever we have a choice regarding which Landsat and Sentinel images to pair up with the Planet images, we have chosen those that had the least cloud cover. A particularly important feature of our dataset is that the high-res and the low-res images are spatially aligned together with our MuRA framework presented in this paper. Foundational to the alignment calculation is the modeling of inter-satellite misalignment errors with polynomials as in NASA's AROP algorithm. We have named our dataset MuRA-T for the MuRA framework that is used for aligning the cross-satellite images and "T" for the temporal dimension in the dataset.