Land Cover Classification

Ask about this topic

Overview

Land cover classification uses remote sensing to map what occupies the Earth’s surface, supporting environmental monitoring, agriculture, conservation, and urban planning. Common approaches include random forests and other classical classifiers, CNN and transformer segmentation models, and time-series methods that use seasonal changes; newer systems also combine optical, radar, hyperspectral, and LiDAR data or use pretrained geospatial embeddings. A central challenge is transferring maps across regions, years, sensors, and climate zones, where imagery and class definitions can differ. Researchers also weigh accuracy against annotation needs and compute, while addressing rare or spectrally similar classes and validating maps with spatially independent data.

Latest papers

CardsList

35 papers5 papers in the last four weeks, up 25% on the four weeks before. 0.0% of all new papers.

  1. TerraNostra-Bench: Benchmarking Spatial Downscaling and Temporal Rollout for Global 1-km Land-Use Reconstruction

    Oct 20, 2026Amirpasha Mozaffari, Marina Castaño, Stefano Materia +6Land Cover ClassificationRemote Sensing Benchmarks

    Earth Science Department, Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC), Barcelona, Spain · Foundation Euro-Mediterranean Center on Climate Change, Bologna, Italy · AI Institute, Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC), Barcelona, Spain

  2. A large-scale climate-aware satellite image dataset for domain adaptive land-cover semantic segmentation

    Oct 15, 2026Songlin Liu, Linwei Chen, Li Zhang +2Remote Sensing Image SegmentationLand Cover Classification

    School of Remote Sensing Information Engineering, Wuhan University, 430079, Wuhan, Hubei, China · State Key Laboratory of Geo-information Engineering, 710054, Xi’an, Shaanxi, China · Advanced Research Institute of Multidisciplinary Science, Beijing Institute of Technology, 100081, Beijing, China +2

  3. Deep Learning for Forest Plantation Mapping in Godavari Districts of Andhra Pradesh, India

    Oct 14, 2026Snehal More, Anuj Karpatne, Valerie A. Thomas +1Land Cover ClassificationRemote Sensing

    Department of Forest Resources and Environmental Conservation, Virginia Tech, Virginia, USA. · Department of Computer Science, Virginia Tech, Virginia, USA

  4. Exploring Interpretability in Deep Learning-Based Forest Classification - Separating Similar Forest Classes using Sentinel-2 Time Series

    Oct 13, 2026Maximilian Kirsch, Christine PreisachInterpretable Time-Series ClassificationTree Species Classification

    Intelligent Systems Research Group (ISRG), Karlsruhe University of Applied Sciences, Germany

  5. Recognition of Urbanized Areas in UAV-Derived Very-High-Resolution Visible-Light Imagery

    Sep 30, 2026Edyta Puniach, Wojciech Gruszczyński, Paweł Ćwiąkała +2Land Cover ClassificationUAV Remote Sensing

    AGH University of Krakow, Faculty of Geo-Data Science, Geodesy, and Environmental Engineering, Mickiewicza 30, 30-059 Krakow, Poland · The Mærsk Mc-Kinney Møller Institute, University of Southern Denmark, Campusvej 55, DK-5230 Odense, Denmark

  6. Geospatial embeddings detect old-growth forests but buffered spatial validation narrows their advantage over Sentinel features

    Sep 23, 2026Thomas Ratsakatika, Mihai Zotta, Srinivasan Keshav +1Geospatial Foundation ModelsLand Cover Classification

    Department of Geography, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK · Fundatia Conservation Carpathia, Brasov, Romania · Department of Computer Science and Technology, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK

  7. A Systematic Evaluation of the COTQ Provincial Land Cover Product: Structural Consistency, Spectral Separability, and Relative Positioning Against ESA, ESRI, and Google Products

    Sep 15, 2026Étienne Clabaut, Samuel Foucher, Yacine BouroubiLand Cover ClassificationRemote Sensing

    Département de Géomatique Appliquée, Université de Sherbrooke, Sherbrooke, QC J1K 2R1, Canada

  8. From Foundation Embeddings to Cropland Maps: Label Efficiency, Temporal Transferability and Independent Human Validation

    Sep 15, 2026Mohammad Ammar Mughees, Giovanni Montefoschi, Zhongxin Chen +1Agricultural Remote SensingGeospatial Foundation Models

    Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Politecnico di Milano, Milan, Italy · Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, Rome, Italy

  9. Lightweight Adaptation of General-Purpose VLMs for Multispectral and SAR Image Understanding

    Sep 2, 2026Shanji Liu, Kelu Yao, Junxiao Xue +5Synthetic Aperture RadarVLM Adaptation

    Zhejiang University · Zhejiang Lab

  10. Detection of Christmas tree plantations from high-resolution aerial imagery. A case study in the French Morvan

    Aug 27, 2026Francesca Razzano, Emanuele Dalsasso, Adrien Baysse-Lainé +3Remote Sensing Image SegmentationLand Cover Classification

    Engineering Department, University of Naples Parthenope, Naples, Italy · INRIA, Grenoble, France · CNRS Délégation Alpes: Grenoble, Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes, France +1

  11. Temporal Sensitivity Analysis of Tessera Embeddings

    Aug 27, 2026Julia Guerrero-Viu, Alex López-Cifuentes, Ignacio Pérez-Villar +1Land Cover ClassificationGeospatial Foundation Models

  12. Mapping Woody Vegetation from Multi-Source Imagery and Prediction Fusion for Enhanced Data Efficiency and Accuracy

    Aug 26, 2026Kal Backman, Jared Wood, Adam RoffRemote Sensing Image SegmentationLand Cover Classification

    New South Wales Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water, Parramatta, 2150, NSW, Australia · Monash University, Clayton, 3800, Vic, Australia · Earth Observation Lab, University of New England, Armidale, 2351, NSW, Australia +1

  13. From crown candidates to neighborhood screening: integrating optical GeoAI and spatial modeling for urban-canopy assessment in Davis, California

    Aug 14, 2026Mohammadreza Narimani, Shreyan Mitra, Parastoo FarajpoorRemote Sensing Image SegmentationLand Cover Classification

    Department of Biological and Agricultural Engineering, University of California, Davis, Davis, CA, 95616, USA · California High School, San Ramon, CA, 94583, USA

  14. Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks for Spatially Independent Multispectral Land Classification

    Aug 13, 2026Katherine L. Bauer, Teemu Harkonen, Simo Sarkka +1Land Cover ClassificationImage Classification

    Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB, Canada · Department of Electrical Engineering and Automation, Aalto University, Helsinki, Finland

  15. SwissCrop25: A National Multi-Year Benchmark for Operational Crop Mapping

    Aug 10, 2026Thomas Lauber, Mehmet Ozgur Turkoglu, Sélène Ledain +1Agricultural Remote SensingLand Cover Classification

    Earth Observation of Agroecosystems Team, Agroscope, Switzerland

  16. Multi-Year Geospatial Reasoning using Interannually-Consistent Historical Predictions as a Free Input Modality

    Aug 6, 2026Syed Roshaan Ali Shah, Kasper Bonte, David Bekaert +2Agricultural Image AnalysisAgricultural Remote Sensing

    VITO Remote Sensing, Mol, Belgium

  17. Earth Embeddings

    Aug 4, 2026Adam J. Stewart, Heng Fang, Isaac A. Corley +1Geospatial Representation LearningLand Cover Classification

    Chair of Data Science in Earth Observation, Technical University of Munich, Munich, Germany · Munich Center for Machine Learning, Munich, Germany · KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden +1

  18. From Forest to Future Capital: Tracking Land Cover Change in Ibu Kota Nusantara (IKN) from 2021 to 2026 with PlanetScope Imagery

    Aug 2, 2026Clarissa Rui Min Ong, Elizabeth Tee Inn Loo, Kenneth Woon Hao Soh +3Land Cover Classification

    Department of Geography, National University of Singapore, Singapore, 117570, Singapore · Department of Geography and Resource Management, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shatin, Hong Kong, , China

  19. When Less Is More: A Controlled Benchmark of Lightweight CNNs for Satellite Land-Cover Segmentation on DeepGlobe

    Jul 25, 2026Atiq Ur Rehman, Joseph Michael DonovanRemote Sensing Image SegmentationLand Cover Classification

    Department of Economics & Decision Sciences, University of South Dakota, Vermillion, SD, USA · University of South Dakota, Vermillion, USA

  20. HyperImageNet: A Large-Scale High-Spatial Resolution Hyperspectral Imagery Classification Benchmark

    Jul 23, 2026Chuguang Zeng, Jingtao Li, Yinhe Liu +1Remote Sensing Image SegmentationLand Cover Classification

    Wuhan University 430072 Wuhan, China

  21. Context-Aware Slum Mapping in Sub-Saharan Africa Using Sentinel-1 Texture and Local Climate Zones

    Jul 8, 2026Peterson Chepkilot, Babak Memar, Paolo GambaRemote Sensing Image UnderstandingCamera-Radar Fusion

    Department of Civil, Building and Environmental Engineering, Sapienza University of Rome, 00184 Rome, Italy · Department of Electrical, Computer and Biomedical Engineering, University of Pavia, 27100 Pavia, Italy

  22. BELDE: Building a Large-scale Earth-observation Land-cover Dataset for Europe

    Jun 18, 2026Ümit Mert Çağlar, Alptekin TemizelRemote Sensing Image SegmentationDistribution Shift

    Graduate School of Informatics, Middle East Technical University, Ankara, Turkey

  23. ROSA-TFormer: A Radar-Optical Sensor-Aware Temporal Transformer for Pinus sylvestris Plantation Classification in Northern Shaanxi Using GEE-Derived Sentinel-1/2 Time Series

    Jun 17, 2026Nengbo Zhang, Chang shengTime Series ClassificationLand Cover Classification

    Key Laboratory of Remote Sensing and Digital Earth, Aerospace Information Research Institute, Chinese Academy of Sciences (AIRCAS), Beijing 100101, China

  24. Heterogeneous SAR-optical fusion for near-real-time land use and land cover mapping under cloud contamination: A novel framework and global benchmark dataset

    Jun 16, 2026Jiangong Xu, Weibao Xue, Xiaoyu Yu +3Land Cover ClassificationRemote Sensing

    State Key Laboratory of Information Engineering in Surveying, Mapping and Remote Sensing, Wuhan University, Wuhan 430079, China · Oriental Space Port Research Institute, Yantai, 265100, China · Hubei Luojia Laboratory, Wuhan, 430079, China +3

  25. LALE: Lightweight-Transformer Architecture for Land-Cover Estimation

    Jun 1, 2026Ümit Mert Çağlar, Alptekin TemizelRemote Sensing Image SegmentationHybrid CNN-Transformer Architectures

    Graduate School of Informatics, METU, Ankara, Turkey

  26. 3D LULC classification using multispectral LiDAR and deep learning: current and prospective schemes

    May 21, 2026Narges Takhtkeshha, Aldino Rizaldy, Markus Hollaus +3Remote Sensing Image UnderstandingPoint Cloud Classification

    3D Optical Metrology (3DOM) Unit, Bruno Kessler Foundation (FBK), Trento, Italy · Department of Geodesy and Geoinformation, TU Wien, Vienna, Austria · Helmholtz-ZentrumDresden-Rossendorf (HZDR), Helmholtz Institute Freiberg for Resource Technology (HIF), Freiberg, Germany +2

  27. Flow matching for Sentinel-2 super-resolution: implementation, application, and implications

    May 1, 2026Dakota Hester, Vitor S. Martins, Lucas B. Ferreira +2Flow MatchingLand Cover Classification

    Department of Agricultural and Biological Engineering, Mississippi State University · North Mississippi Research and Extension Center, Mississippi State University

  28. Parameterized Quantum Circuits as Feature Maps: Representation Quality and Readout Effects in Multispectral Land-Cover Classification

    Apr 29, 2026Ralntion Komini, Aikaterini Mandilara, Georgios Maragkopoulos +1Quantum Feature MapsLand Cover Classification

    Department of Informatics and Telecommunications, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece · Eulambia Advanced Technologies Ltd, Agiou Ioannou 24, Ag. Paraskevi, 15342, Greece

  29. MapSR: Prompt-Driven Land Cover Map Super-Resolution via Vision Foundation Models

    Apr 16, 2026Ruiqi Wang, Qi Yu, Jie Ma +1Graph-Based Label PropagationLand Cover Classification

    School of Information Science and Technology, Beijing Foreign Studies University, Beijing 100089, China

  30. Riverine Land Cover Mapping through Semantic Segmentation of Multispectral Point Clouds

    Mar 23, 2026Sopitta Thurachen, Josef Taher, Matti Lehtomäki +6Point TransformerLand Cover Classification

    Department of Remote Sensing and Photogrammetry, Finnish Geospatial Research Institute FGI, Vuorimiehentie 5, Espoo, 02150, Finland · Faculty of Technology, University of Turku, Turku, 20014, Finland · Department of Geography and Geology, University of Turku, Turku, 20014, Finland +1