Regularly updated and accurate land cover maps are essential for monitoring 14 of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals. Multispectral satellite imagery provide high-quality and valuable information at global scale that can be used to develop land cover classification models. However, such a global application requires a geographically diverse training dataset. Here, we present LandCoverNet, a global training dataset for land cover classification based on Sentinel-2 observations at 10m spatial resolution. Land cover class labels are defined based on annual time-series of Sentinel-2, and verified by consensus among three human annotators.
TU Kaiserslautern（凯撒斯劳滕工业大学）；German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI)（德国人工智能研究中心（DFKI））
In this paper, we address the challenge of land use and land cover classification using Sentinel-2 satellite images. The Sentinel-2 satellite images are openly and freely accessible provided in the Earth observation program Copernicus. We present a novel dataset based on Sentinel-2 satellite images covering 13 spectral bands and consisting out of 10 classes with in total 27,000 labeled and geo-referenced images. We provide benchmarks for this novel dataset with its spectral bands using state-of-the-art deep Convolutional Neural Network (CNNs). With the proposed novel dataset, we achieved an ov…
RIKEN AIP（理化学研究所先进智能项目中心）；The University of Tokyo（东京大学）
We introduce OpenEarthMap, a benchmark dataset, for global high-resolution land cover mapping. OpenEarthMap consists of 2.2 million segments of 5000 aerial and satellite images covering 97 regions from 44 countries across 6 continents, with manually annotated 8-class land cover labels at a 0.25--0.5m ground sampling distance. Semantic segmentation models trained on the OpenEarthMap generalize worldwide and can be used as off-the-shelf models in a variety of applications. We evaluate the performance of state-of-the-art methods for unsupervised domain adaptation and present challenging problem s…
University of Southampton（南安普顿大学）；Georgia Institute of Technology（佐治亚理工学院）
Land cover classification (LCC), and monitoring how land use changes over time, is an important process in climate change mitigation and adaptation. Existing approaches that use machine learning with Earth observation data for LCC rely on fully-annotated and segmented datasets. Creating these datasets requires a large amount of effort, and a lack of suitable datasets has become an obstacle in scaling the use of LCC. In this study, we propose Scene-to-Patch models: an alternative LCC approach utilising Multiple Instance Learning (MIL) that requires only high-level scene labels. This enables muc…
University of Technology Sydney（悉尼科技大学）；IBM Australia Limited（IBM澳大利亚有限公司）；University of New England（新英格兰大学）；King Abdulaziz University（阿卜杜勒阿齐兹国王大学）；Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia（马来西亚国民大学）
The ever-growing volume of satellite imagery data presents a challenge for industry and governments making data-driven decisions based on the timely analysis of very large data sets. Commonly used deep learning algorithms for automatic classification of satellite images are time and resource-intensive to train. The cost of retraining in the context of Big Data presents a practical challenge when new image data and/or classes are added to a training corpus. Recognizing the need for an adaptable, accurate, and scalable satellite image chip classification scheme, in this research we present an en…
Wuhan University（武汉大学）；Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院）；China Land Survey and Planning Institute（中国国土勘测规划院）
In recent years, large amount of high spatial-resolution remote sensing (HRRS) images are available for land-cover mapping. However, due to the complex information brought by the increased spatial resolution and the data disturbances caused by different conditions of image acquisition, it is often difficult to find an efficient method for achieving accurate land-cover classification with high-resolution and heterogeneous remote sensing images. In this paper, we propose a scheme to apply deep model obtained from labeled land-cover dataset to classify unlabeled HRRS images. The main idea is to r…
Land use and land cover mapping are essential to various fields of study, including forestry, agriculture, and urban management. Using earth observation satellites both facilitate and accelerate the task. Lately, deep learning methods have proven to be excellent at automating the mapping via semantic image segmentation. However, because deep neural networks require large amounts of labeled data, it is not easy to exploit the full potential of satellite imagery. Additionally, the land cover tends to differ in appearance from one region to another; therefore, having labeled data from one locatio…
CEREMA, Centre d'études et d'expertise sur les risques, l'environnement, la mobilité et l'aménagement（法国风险、环境、流动性与规划研究与评估中心（CEREMA））
This paper describes a methodology to produce a 7-classes land cover map of urban areas from very high resolution images and limited noisy labeled data. The objective is to make a segmentation map of a large area (a french department) with the following classes: asphalt, bare soil, building, grassland, mineral material (permeable artificialized areas), forest and water from 20cm aerial images and Digital Height Model. We created a training dataset on a few areas of interest aggregating databases, semi-automatic classification, and manual annotation to get a complete ground truth in each class.…
Land-cover classification using remote sensing imagery is an important Earth observation task. Recently, land cover classification has benefited from the development of fully connected neural networks for semantic segmentation. The benchmark datasets available for training deep segmentation models in remote sensing imagery tend to be small, however, often consisting of only a handful of images from a single location with a single scale. This limits the models' ability to generalize to other datasets. Domain adaptation has been proposed to improve the models' generalization but we find these ap…
DI3CL: Contrastive Learning With Dynamic Instances and Contour Consistency for SAR Land-Cover Classification Foundation Model
Key Laboratory of Intelligent Perception and Image Understanding of Ministry of Education（教育部智能感知与图像理解重点实验室）；International Research Center for Intelligent Perception and Computation（智能感知与计算国际研究中心）；Joint International Research Laboratory of Intelligent Perception and Computation（智能感知与计算联合国际实验室）；School of Artificial Intelligence, Xidian University（西安电子科技大学人工智能学院）；Hangzhou Institute of Technology（杭州科技学院）
The University of Tennessee, Knoxville（田纳西大学诺克斯维尔分校）；Applied Research Associates（应用研究联合公司）
Land cover classification of satellite imagery is an important step toward analyzing the Earth's surface. Existing models assume a closed-set setting where both the training and testing classes belong to the same label set. However, due to the unique characteristics of satellite imagery with an extremely vast area of versatile cover materials, the training data are bound to be non-representative. In this paper, we study the problem of open-set land cover classification that identifies the samples belonging to unknown classes during testing, while maintaining performance on known classes. Altho…
LandSegmenter: Towards a Flexible Foundation Model for Land Use and Land Cover Mapping
Chair of Data Science in Earth Observation, Technical University of Munich（地球观测数据科学教授职位，慕尼黑技术大学）；Munich Center for Machine Learning (MCML)（慕尼黑机器学习中心（MCML））
This work presents SeasoNet, a new large-scale multi-label land cover and land use scene understanding dataset. It includes $1\,759\,830$ images from Sentinel-2 tiles, with 12 spectral bands and patch sizes of up to $ 120 \ \mathrm{px} \times 120 \ \mathrm{px}$. Each image is annotated with large scale pixel level labels from the German land cover model LBM-DE2018 with land cover classes based on the CORINE Land Cover database (CLC) 2018 and a five times smaller minimum mapping unit (MMU) than the original CLC maps. We provide pixel synchronous examples from all four seasons, plus an additiona…
Land-cover classification has long been a hot and difficult challenge in remote sensing community. With massive High-resolution Remote Sensing (HRS) images available, manually and automatically designed Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have already shown their great latent capacity on HRS land-cover classification in recent years. Especially, the former can achieve better performance while the latter is able to generate lightweight architecture. Unfortunately, they both have shortcomings. On the one hand, because manual CNNs are almost proposed for natural image processing, it becomes very…
Semi-supervised learning techniques are gaining popularity due to their capability of building models that are effective, even when scarce amounts of labeled data are available. In this paper, we present a framework and specific tasks for self-supervised pretraining of \textit{multichannel} models, such as the fusion of multispectral and synthetic aperture radar images. We show that the proposed self-supervised approach is highly effective at learning features that correlate with the labels for land cover classification. This is enabled by an explicit design of pretraining tasks which promotes…
Mask Clustering-based Annotation Engine for Large-Scale Submeter Land Cover Mapping
State Key Laboratory of Information Engineering in Surveying, Mapping and Remote Sensing (LIESMARS)（信息工程测绘遥感国家重点实验室）；Wuhan University（武汉大学）；School of Artificial Intelligence（人工智能学院）；Chinese Antarctic Center of Surveying and Mapping（测绘南极中心）
Land cover maps are a vital input variable to many types of environmental research and management. While they can be produced automatically by machine learning techniques, these techniques require substantial training data to achieve high levels of accuracy, which are not always available. One technique researchers use when labelled training data are scarce is domain adaptation (DA) -- where data from an alternate region, known as the source domain, are used to train a classifier and this model is adapted to map the study region, or target domain. The scenario we address in this paper is known…
Institute for Development and Research in Banking Technology（银行技术发展与研究所）；Indian Statistical Institute（印度统计研究所）
Land cover classification using multispectral satellite image is a very challenging task with numerous practical applications. We propose a multi-stage classifier that involves fuzzy rule extraction from the training data and then generation of a possibilistic label vector for each pixel using the fuzzy rule base. To exploit the spatial correlation of land cover types we propose four different information aggregation methods which use the possibilistic class label of a pixel and those of its eight spatial neighbors for making the final classification decision. Three of the aggregation methods …
German Aerospace Center (DLR)（德国航空航天中心）；Technical University of Munich (TUM)（慕尼黑工业大学）；RIKEN（理化学研究所）；CNRS（法国国家科学研究中心）；Grenoble INP（格勒诺布尔国立高等物理、数学与信息学院）
In this paper, we aim at tackling a general but interesting cross-modality feature learning question in remote sensing community --- can a limited amount of highly-discrimin-ative (e.g., hyperspectral) training data improve the performance of a classification task using a large amount of poorly-discriminative (e.g., multispectral) data? Traditional semi-supervised manifold alignment methods do not perform sufficiently well for such problems, since the hyperspectral data is very expensive to be largely collected in a trade-off between time and efficiency, compared to the multispectral data. To …
Unsupervised Domain Adaptation Architecture Search with Self-Training for Land Cover Mapping
RIKEN Center for Advanced Intelligence Project (AIP), RIKEN（理化学研究所先进智能中心（AIP））；Graduate School of Frontier Sciences, The University of Tokyo（东京大学前沿科学研究院）
Remote Sensing Technology Institute, German Aerospace Center（德国航空航天中心遥感技术研究所）；Technical University of Munich（慕尼黑工业大学）；Aerospace Information Research Institute, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院空天信息创新研究院）；Univ. Grenoble Alpes（格勒诺布尔阿尔卑斯大学）；INRIA（法国国家信息与自动化研究所）；CNRS（法国国家科学研究中心）；Grenoble INP（格勒诺布尔理工学院）
As remote sensing (RS) data obtained from different sensors become available largely and openly, multimodal data processing and analysis techniques have been garnering increasing interest in the RS and geoscience community. However, due to the gap between different modalities in terms of imaging sensors, resolutions, and contents, embedding their complementary information into a consistent, compact, accurate, and discriminative representation, to a great extent, remains challenging. To this end, we propose a shared and specific feature learning (S2FL) model. S2FL is capable of decomposing mult…
S2RC-GCN: A Spatial-Spectral Reliable Contrastive Graph Convolutional Network for Complex Land Cover Classification Using Hyperspectral Images
School of Computer China University of Geosciences Wuhan, China；School of Geography；Information Engineering China University of Geosciences Wuhan, China；School of Management Wuhan University of Science
OpenEarthMap-SAR: A Benchmark Synthetic Aperture Radar Dataset for Global High-Resolution Land Cover Mapping
RIKEN Center for Advanced Intelligence Project (AIP), RIKEN（理化学研究所先进智能中心（AIP），理化学研究所）；Graduate School of Frontier Sciences, The University of Tokyo（东京大学前沿科学研究生院）
Heterogeneous SAR-optical fusion for near-real-time land use and land cover mapping under cloud contamination: A novel framework and global benchmark dataset
State Key Laboratory of Information Engineering in Surveying, Mapping and Remote Sensing（信息工程测绘与遥感国家重点实验室）；School of Computer Science and Information Engineering（计算机科学与信息工程学院）；Hangzhou International Innovation Institute（杭州国际创新研究院）；Oriental Space Port Research Institute（东方航天港研究院）；Hubei Luojia Laboratory（湖北珞珈实验室）
IRSAMap:Towards Large-Scale, High-Resolution Land Cover Map Vectorization
Aerospace Information Research Institute, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院 aerospace information research institute）；School of Electronic, Electrical and Communication Engineering, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学电子电气与通信工程学院）；School of Software Engineering, Xi’an Jiaotong University（西安交通大学软件工程学院）
Supervised and self-supervised land-cover segmentation & classification of the Biesbosch wetlands
ESRIN, European Space Agency（欧洲空间局ESRIN）；Dept. of Aerospace Engineering, University of Naples Federico II（那不勒斯费德里科二世大学航空航天工程系）；University of Amsterdam（阿姆斯特丹大学）
Politecnico di Torino（都灵理工大学）；International Islamic University（国际伊斯兰大学）
The increasing availability of large-scale remote sensing labeled data has prompted researchers to develop increasingly precise and accurate data-driven models for land cover and crop classification (LC&CC). Moreover, with the introduction of self-attention and introspection mechanisms, deep learning approaches have shown promising results in processing long temporal sequences in the multi-spectral domain with a contained computational request. Nevertheless, most practical applications cannot rely on labeled data, and in the field, surveys are a time consuming solution that poses strict limita…
University of Minnesota（明尼苏达大学）；University of Pittsburgh（匹兹堡大学）
Land cover mapping is essential for monitoring global environmental change and managing natural resources. Unfortunately, traditional classification models are plagued by limited training data available in existing land cover products and data heterogeneity over space and time. In this survey, we provide a structured and comprehensive overview of challenges in land cover mapping and machine learning methods used to address these problems. We also discuss the gaps and opportunities that exist for advancing research in this promising direction.
Time series data of urban land cover is of great utility in analyzing urban growth patterns, changes in distribution of impervious surface and vegetation and resulting impacts on urban micro climate. While Landsat data is ideal for such analysis due to the long time series of free imagery, traditional per-pixel hard classification fails to yield full potential of the Landsat data. This paper proposes a sub-pixel classification method that leverages the temporal overlap of Landsat-5 TM and Resourcesat-1 LISS-IV sensors. We train a convolutional neural network to predict fractional land cover ma…
Norwegian Institute for Nature Research - NINA（挪威自然研究所）
Widely used European land cover maps such as CORINE are produced at medium spatial resolutions (100 m) and rely on diverse data with complex workflows requiring significant institutional capacity. We present a high resolution (10 m) land cover map (ELC10) of Europe based on a satellite-driven machine learning workflow that is annually updatable. A Random Forest classification model was trained on 70K ground-truth points from the LUCAS (Land Use/Cover Area frame Survey) dataset. Within the Google Earth Engine cloud computing environment, the ELC10 map can be generated from approx. 700 TB of Sen…
Geographical Context Matters: Bridging Fine and Coarse Spatial Information to Enhance Continental Land Cover Mapping
University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences, Vienna（维也纳自然资源与生命科学大学）；University of Montpellier（蒙彼利埃大学）；AgroParisTech（巴黎农艺学院）；CIRAD（法国国际农业发展研究中心）；CNRS（法国国家科学研究中心）；INRAE（法国国家农业食品与环境研究院）；INRIA（法国国家信息与自动化研究院）
In this paper we present our work on developing an automated system for land cover classification. This system takes a multiband satellite image of an area as input and outputs the land cover map of the area at the same resolution as the input. For this purpose convolutional machine learning models were trained in the task of predicting the land cover semantic segmentation of satellite images. This is a case of supervised learning. The land cover label data were taken from the CORINE Land Cover inventory and the satellite images were taken from the Copernicus hub. As for the model, U-Net archi…
In training machine learning models for land cover semantic segmentation there is a stark contrast between the availability of satellite imagery to be used as inputs and ground truth data to enable supervised learning. While thousands of new satellite images become freely available on a daily basis, getting ground truth data is still very challenging, time consuming and costly. In this paper we present Embedding Earth a self-supervised contrastive pre-training method for leveraging the large availability of satellite imagery to improve performance on downstream dense land cover classification …
Evaluation of Deep Learning Semantic Segmentation for Land Cover Mapping on Multispectral, Hyperspectral and High Spatial Aerial Imagery
Center for Space and Remote Sensing Research, National Central University（国立中央大学太空及遥测研究中心）；Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering, National Central University（国立中央大学资讯工程学系）
University of Minnesota（明尼苏达大学）；University of Pittsburgh（匹兹堡大学）
The availability of massive earth observing satellite data provide huge opportunities for land use and land cover mapping. However, such mapping effort is challenging due to the existence of various land cover classes, noisy data, and the lack of proper labels. Also, each land cover class typically has its own unique temporal pattern and can be identified only during certain periods. In this article, we introduce a novel architecture that incorporates the UNet structure with Bidirectional LSTM and Attention mechanism to jointly exploit the spatial and temporal nature of satellite data and to b…
Henry M. Gunn High School（亨利·M·冈恩高中）；Rutgers University（罗格斯大学）
This paper presents a change detection method that identifies land cover changes from aerial imagery, using semantic segmentation, a machine learning approach. We present a land cover classification training pipeline with Deeplab v3+, state-of-the-art semantic segmentation technology, including data preparation, model training for seven land cover types, and model exporting modules. In the land cover change detection system, the inputs are images retrieved from Google Earth at the same location but from different times. The system then predicts semantic segmentation results on these images usi…
Yale University（耶鲁大学）；Microsoft AI for Good（微软AI造福全球）；Microsoft Research（微软研究院）
We present simple algorithms for land cover change detection in the 2021 IEEE GRSS Data Fusion Contest. The task of the contest is to create high-resolution (1m / pixel) land cover change maps of a study area in Maryland, USA, given multi-resolution imagery and label data. We study several baseline models for this task and discuss directions for further research. See https://dfc2021.blob.core.windows.net/competition-data/dfc2021_index.txt for the data and https://github.com/calebrob6/dfc2021-msd-baseline for an implementation of these baselines.
Freie Universität Berlin（柏林自由大学）；Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn（波恩莱茵弗里德里希·威廉大学）；Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin（柏林洪堡大学）
Remote sensing satellite data offer the unique possibility to map land use land cover transformations by providing spatially explicit information. However, detection of short-term processes and land use patterns of high spatial-temporal variability is a challenging task. We present a novel framework using multi-temporal TerraSAR-X data and machine learning techniques, namely Discriminative Markov Random Fields with spatio-temporal priors, and Import Vector Machines, in order to advance the mapping of land cover characterized by short-term changes. Our study region covers a current deforestatio…
State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry（纽约州立大学环境科学与林业学院）
Novel plant communities reshape landscapes and pose challenges for land cover classification and mapping that can constrain research and stewardship efforts. In the US Northeast, emergence of low-statured woody vegetation, or shrublands, instead of secondary forests in post-agricultural landscapes is well-documented by field studies, but poorly understood from a landscape perspective, which limits the ability to systematically study and manage these lands. To address gaps in classification/mapping of low-statured cover types where they have been historically rare, we developed models to predic…
Many significant applications need land cover information of remote sensing images that are acquired from different areas and times, such as change detection and disaster monitoring. However, it is difficult to find a generic land cover classification scheme for different remote sensing images due to the spectral shift caused by diverse acquisition condition. In this paper, we develop a novel land cover classification method that can deal with large-scale data captured from widely distributed areas and different times. Additionally, we establish a large-scale land cover classification dataset …
INRAE（法国国家农业、食品与环境研究院）；University of Montpellier（蒙彼利埃大学）；CIRAD（法国国际农业发展研究中心）
Nowadays, there is a general agreement on the need to better characterize agricultural monitoring systems in response to the global changes. Timely and accurate land use/land cover mapping can support this vision by providing useful information at fine scale. Here, a deep learning approach is proposed to deal with multi-source land cover mapping at object level. The approach is based on an extension of Recurrent Neural Network enriched via an attention mechanism dedicated to multi-temporal data context. Moreover, a new hierarchical pretraining strategy designed to exploit specific domain knowl…
