Long time-series NDVI reconstruction in cloud-prone regions via spatio-temporal tensor completion

The applications of Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) time-series data are inevitably hampered by cloud-induced gaps and noise. Although numerous reconstruction methods have been developed, they have not effectively addressed the issues associated with large gaps in the time series over cloudy and rainy regions, due to the insufficient utilization of the spatial, temporal and periodical correlations. In this paper, an adaptive Spatio-Temporal Tensor Completion method (termed ST-Tensor) method is proposed to reconstruct long-term NDVI time series in cloud-prone regions, by making full use of the multi-dimensional spatio-temporal information simultaneously. For this purpose, a highly-correlated tensor is built by considering the correlations among the spatial neighbors, inter-annual variations, and periodic characteristics, in order to reconstruct the missing information via an adaptive-weighted low-rank tensor completion model. An iterative ℓ1 trend filtering method is then implemented to eliminate the residual temporal noise. This new method was tested using MODIS 16-day composite NDVI products from 2001 to 2018 obtained in Mainland Southeast Asia, where the rainy climate commonly induces large gaps and noise in the data. The qualitative and quantitative results indicate that the ST-Tensor method is more effective than the five previous methods in addressing the different missing data problems, especially the temporally continuous gaps and spatio-temporally continuous gaps. It is also shown that the ST-Tensor method performs better than the other methods in tracking NDVI seasonal trajectories, and is therefore a superior option for generating high-quality long-term NDVI time series for cloud-prone regions. •A new method was proposed to reconstruct long-term NDVI series in cloudy regions.•It is the first time to introduce low-rank tensor completion in NDVI reconstruction.•Information among spatiotemporal and periodic neighbors is synthesized simultaneously.•Robustness of iterative trend filtering method in keeping feature points is proved.•Continuous gaps are well addressed and NDVI seasonal trajectories are well tracked.