Stage 4 validation of the Satellite Image Automatic Mapper lightweight computer program for Earth observation Level 2 product generation, Part 1 Theory

The European Space Agency (ESA) defines an Earth Observation (EO) Level 2 product as a multi-spectral (MS) image corrected for geometric, atmospheric, adjacency and topographic effects, stacked with its data-derived scene classification map (SCM), whose legend includes quality layers such as cloud and cloud-shadow. No ESA EO Level 2 product has ever been systematically generated at the ground segment. To contribute toward filling an analytic and pragmatic information gap from EO big data to the ESA EO Level 2 product, an original Stage 4 validation (Val) of the Satellite Image Automatic Mapper (SIAM) lightweight computer program was conducted by independent means on an annual Web-Enabled Landsat Data (WELD) image composite time-series of the conterminous U.S. The non-iterative SIAM application was designed to run automatically in near real-time on the web and on mobile devices. Its core is a one-pass prior knowledge-based decision tree for MS reflectance space hyperpolyhedralization into static (non-adaptive-to-data) color names presented in literature in recent years. For the sake of readability this paper is split into two. The present Part 1 – Theory provides the multidisciplinary background of a priori color naming in cognitive science, from linguistics to computer vision, and surveys related works on static MS color naming. To cope with dictionaries of MS color names and land cover class names that do not coincide and must be harmonized, an original hybrid (combined deductive and inductive) guideline is proposed to identify a categorical variable-pair relationship. An original quantitative measure of categorical variable-pair association is also proposed. The subsequent Part 2 – Validation presents and discusses Stage 4 Val results collected by an original protocol for wall-to-wall thematic map quality assessment without sampling where the test and reference map legends can differ. Conclusions are that the SIAM-WELD maps instantiate a Level 2 SCM product whose legend is the 4-class taxonomy of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations – Land Cover Classification System (LCCS) at the Dichotomous Phase Level 1 (vegetation/nonvegetation), Level 2 (terrestrial/aquatic) or superior LCCS level.