Improving the Consistency of Multitemporal Land Cover Maps Using a Hidden Markov Model

Land cover and land use affect a wide range of regional-scale to global-scale ecosystem processes, and many Earth system models rely on accurate land cover information. However, multitemporal land cover products often show unrealistically high levels of year-to-year label change, particularly at coarse spatial resolution (i.e., 300-500 m). Much of this apparent land cover change arises from errors in classification and does not indicate real change in land cover or land use. In this paper, we present a novel framework that uses a hidden Markov model (HMM) to help distinguish real land cover change from spurious land cover changes in classification time series. We apply the HMM as a postprocessing step to supervised classification, and we solve for the optimal label sequence using existing HMM algorithms. Our results demonstrate that the HMM provides a rigorous framework for capturing temporal context and likelihood of land cover change at each pixel. We evaluated our approach using the MODIS Collection 5.1 Land Cover Type product (MCD12Q1), focusing on areas that have experienced little change over the MODIS time series, and areas that have experienced well characterized change (e.g., deforestation). We show that the HMM method provides label sequences that are more accurate and that exhibit less year-to-year variability than label sequences produced by ensemble-decision-tree classification or by postprocessing heuristics that have been used in recent versions of MCD12Q1 product. The framework that we present offers an improvement over conventional multitemporal land cover classification methods, and it is widely applicable to problems in multitemporal land cover and land use monitoring.