PhenoStitch: Training-Free Panoptic Crop Mapping from Satellite Image Time Series

Crop type classification from optical satellite time series remains limited in its ability to generalize across growing seasons, particularly when crop phenology shifts due to inter-annual weather variability. This hampers deployment in operational settings where current-year labels are unavailable. In addition, uncertainty quantification is often overlooked, reducing the reliability of such approaches for practical crop monitoring. Inspired by ecophysiological principles, we introduce Thermal Time-based Temporal Sampling ($T^3S$), a simple, model-agnostic method that replaces calendar time with thermal time. By re-indexing satellite observations by cumulative growing degree days, $T^3S$ aligns phenologically equivalent growth stages across years, reducing temporal redundancy while concentrating on the most biologically informative periods. We evaluate $T^3S$ across three architecturally distinct backbones on (i) SwissCrop, a new country-scale, multi-year Sentinel-2 dataset with paired temperature data that we publicly release, and (ii) the cross-region TimeMatch benchmark spanning Denmark and France. Across these settings, $T^3S$ consistently improves cross-year and cross-region crop classification over several state-of-the-art baselines, including thermal positional encoding, with particularly strong gains in uncertainty calibration, robustness under label scarcity, and early-season prediction, while requiring no architectural modification.

Field-boundary maps support crop monitoring, irrigation planning, and yield estimation, but many smallholder parcels span only a few 10 m Sentinel-2 pixels. We introduce Fields of the Planet (FTP), a 3 m PlanetScope companion to Fields of The World (FTW) that pairs the same polygons, seasonal windows, and train/test splits with 133,168 co-registered PlanetScope patch-window targets across 24 countries. FTP evaluates field delineation as parcel recovery by vectorizing predictions before scoring panoptic quality (PQ), object F1, size-stratified PQ, and meter-scale matched-boundary error. Under matched architectures and training recipes, 3 m imagery raises PQ from 21.0 to 35.5, raises PQ on sub-0.5 ha fields from 5.8 to 15.7, and cuts matched-boundary error from 18.6 m to 7.4 m.

Operational crop mapping requires models that generalise across years, resolve fine-grained crop taxonomies, and distinguish cropland from surrounding landscapes. However, existing crop mapping datasets enable evaluation of these requirements only in isolation. We therefore introduce SwissCrop25, a national-scale crop mapping benchmark dataset spanning seven growing seasons (2019-2025). SwissCrop25 combines Sentinel-2 time series, daily temperature observations, a fine-grained 73 crop taxonomy including grassland management types, and 5 explicit non-crop land cover classes. To evaluate realistic deployment conditions, we define a leave-one-year-out protocol with joint cropland delineation and crop classification for benchmarking representative crop mapping architectures. Evaluating U-TAE (convolutional temporal-attention model), TSViT (transformer-based spatio-temporal model), and Galileo (EO foundation model) reveals differences between architectures hidden by conventional benchmarks. In this setting, domain-specific models outperform Galileo, with TSViT achieving the best overall performance and a 12 pp macro-mIoU advantage over U-TAE. SwissCrop25 also exposes substantial interannual distribution shifts and shows that incorporating temperature-derived phenological information improves robustness. Finally, in-season evaluation reveals a trade-off between models, with U-TAE performing better early in the season and TSViT gaining an advantage later through improved rare-class discrimination. SwissCrop25 provides a challenging testbed for evaluating crop mapping systems under realistic operational conditions and is publicly released at https://huggingface.co/datasets/EOA-team/SwissCrop25 .