TICOI

TICOI is a tool to postprocess surface velocities estimated from remote sensing images (e.g., over glaciers, ice-sheets, landslides or earthquakes). The method is based on the temporal closure principle. It fuses velocity measurements which are multi-temporal (with different temporal baselines) and multi-sensor (from different satellite images), and may have been computed by different processing chains. It takes as input NetCDF files containing the image-pair velocities, that you may have generated yourself. It also natively supports data from the NASA ITS_LIVE project or from Millan et al. (2022).

The package is based on the methodological developments published in:

• Charrier, L., Dehecq, A., Guo, L., Brun, F., Millan, R., Lioret, N., Copland, L., Maier, N., Dow, C., and Halas, P.: TICOI: an operational Python package to generate regular glacier velocity time series, The Cryosphere, 19, 4555–4583, https://doi.org/10.5194/tc-19-4555-2025, 2025.

• Charrier, L., Yan, Y., Koeniguer, E. C., Leinss, S., & Trouvé, E "Extraction of Velocity Time Series With an Optimal Temporal Sampling From Displacement Observation Networks," in IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing, vol. 60, pp. 1-10, 2022, Art no. 4302810, doi: 10.1109/TGRS.2021.3128289.

The main principle of TICOI relies on the temporal closure of the displacement measurement network. Measured displacements with different temporal baselines are expressed as linear combinations of estimated displacement (see the Figure below). The aim is to take advantage of different types of information (displacement measured using different temporal baselines, on images from different types of satellite, using different processing chains) to extract glacier velocity time series, with a given temporal sampling. This enable the harmonization of various datasets, and the creation of standardized sub-annual velocity products.

INSTALLATION

With pip

pip install ticoi

With git clone and mamba

This option allow you to modify the code Clone the git repo and create a mamba environment (see how to install mamba in the mamba documentation):

git clone https://github.com/ticoi/ticoi.git
cd ticoi
mamba env create -f environment.yml -n ticoi_env  # change the name if you want
mamba activate ticoi_env  # Or any other name specified above
pip install -e . #to use the package everywhere locally

TUTORIALS

Basic examples

notebook

• How to process one pixel of a NetCDF file
• How to process one pixel of ITS_LIVE data, stored on a cloud
• How to process a subset of a NetCDF file

python_script

• How to process one cube
• How to process one pixel

Advanced examples

TICOI processing

• How to process one ITS_LIVE cube directly from the cloud
• How to process one IGE cube

Choice of hyperparameters

• How to select the regularization coefficient based on the Velocity Vector Coherence curve

Criterion to evaluate the quality of TICOI results

• How to the Velocity Vector Coherence of TICOI results
• How to apply GLAFT on TICOI results
• How to compute statistics over static areas

TO USE YOUR OWN DATASET

You have geotiff files

You need to convert them into netcdf, by modifying this script.

You have netcdf files

If it is ITS_LIVE data, or Millan et al., 2022, you can directly use them! If not, there are two options:

• you can modify your variables to match TICOI compatible format. For that, your dimensions need to be ("mid_date", "y", "x"), with "mid_date" your time dimension. Your variables need to be:
  • vx, vy (necessary): velocities along your x and y axis in m/y
  • date1, date2 (necessary): first and second date of acquisition of the image-pair
  • errorx, errory (optional): errors along your x and y axis in m/y Your attributes:
  • author (optional): if you want to specify the name of the author
  • source (optional): if you want to specify the source of the dataset
• you can directly add your own data loader to convert your format in TICOI format, inside the TICOI package. For that see an example here

HYPERPARAMETERS AND OUTPUTS

• to understand the output of pixel_demo please check README_output
• to understand the parameters you can change, please check README_possible_parameters

TO CONTRIBUTE

We welcome any contribution to this package! See guidelines here.

CITATION

If you use this package, please cite:

Charrier, L., Dehecq, A., Guo, L., Brun, F., Millan, R., Lioret, N., Copland, L., Maier, N., Dow, C., and Halas, P.: TICOI: an operational Python package to generate regular glacier velocity time series, The Cryosphere, 19, 4555–4583, https://doi.org/10.5194/tc-19-4555-2025, 2025.