Object-oriented spatial-temporal association rules mining on ocean remote sensing imagery

Using the long term marine remote sensing imagery, we develop an object-oriented spatial-temporal association rules mining framework to explore the association rules mining among marine environmental elements. Within the framework, two key issues are addressed. They are how to effectively deal with the related lattices and how to reduce the related dimensions? To deal with the first key issues, this paper develops an object-oriented method for abstracting marine sensitive objects from raster pixels and for representing them with a quadruple. To deal with the second key issues, by embedding the mutual information theory, we construct the direct association pattern tree to reduce the related elements at the first step, and then the Apriori algorithm is used to discover the spatio-temporal associated rules. Finally, Pacific Ocean is taken as a research area and multi- marine remote sensing imagery in recent three decades is used as a case study. The results show that the object-oriented spatio-temporal association rules mining can acquire the associated relationships not only among marine environmental elements in same region, also among the different regions. In addition, the information from association rules mining is much more expressive and informative in space and time than traditional spatio-temporal analysis.