Geographical Context Matters: Bridging Fine and Coarse Spatial Information to Enhance Continental Land Cover Mapping

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Main Authors: Ghassemi, Babak, Fraga-Dantas, Cassio, Gaetano, Raffaele, Ienco, Dino, Ghorbanzadeh, Omid, Izquierdo-Verdiguier, Emma, Vuolo, Francesco
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Ghassemi, Babak
Fraga-Dantas, Cassio
Gaetano, Raffaele
Ienco, Dino
Ghorbanzadeh, Omid
Izquierdo-Verdiguier, Emma
Vuolo, Francesco
author_facet Ghassemi, Babak
Fraga-Dantas, Cassio
Gaetano, Raffaele
Ienco, Dino
Ghorbanzadeh, Omid
Izquierdo-Verdiguier, Emma
Vuolo, Francesco
contents Land use and land cover mapping from Earth Observation (EO) data is a critical tool for sustainable land and resource management. While advanced machine learning and deep learning algorithms excel at analyzing EO imagery data, they often overlook crucial geospatial metadata information that could enhance scalability and accuracy across regional, continental, and global scales. To address this limitation, we propose BRIDGE-LC (Bi-level Representation Integration for Disentangled GEospatial Land Cover), a novel deep learning framework that integrates multi-scale geospatial information into the land cover classification process. By simultaneously leveraging fine-grained (latitude/longitude) and coarse-grained (biogeographical region) spatial information, our lightweight multi-layer perceptron architecture learns from both during training but only requires fine-grained information for inference, allowing it to disentangle region-specific from region-agnostic land cover features while maintaining computational efficiency. To assess the quality of our framework, we use an open-access in-situ dataset and adopt several competing classification approaches commonly considered for large-scale land cover mapping. We evaluated all approaches through two scenarios: an extrapolation scenario in which training data encompasses samples from all biogeographical regions, and a leave-one-region-out scenario where one region is excluded from training. We also explore the spatial representation learned by our model, highlighting a connection between its internal manifold and the geographical information used during training. Our results demonstrate that integrating geospatial information improves land cover mapping performance, with the most substantial gains achieved by jointly leveraging both fine- and coarse-grained spatial information.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2504_12368
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Geographical Context Matters: Bridging Fine and Coarse Spatial Information to Enhance Continental Land Cover Mapping
Ghassemi, Babak
Fraga-Dantas, Cassio
Gaetano, Raffaele
Ienco, Dino
Ghorbanzadeh, Omid
Izquierdo-Verdiguier, Emma
Vuolo, Francesco
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Machine Learning
Land use and land cover mapping from Earth Observation (EO) data is a critical tool for sustainable land and resource management. While advanced machine learning and deep learning algorithms excel at analyzing EO imagery data, they often overlook crucial geospatial metadata information that could enhance scalability and accuracy across regional, continental, and global scales. To address this limitation, we propose BRIDGE-LC (Bi-level Representation Integration for Disentangled GEospatial Land Cover), a novel deep learning framework that integrates multi-scale geospatial information into the land cover classification process. By simultaneously leveraging fine-grained (latitude/longitude) and coarse-grained (biogeographical region) spatial information, our lightweight multi-layer perceptron architecture learns from both during training but only requires fine-grained information for inference, allowing it to disentangle region-specific from region-agnostic land cover features while maintaining computational efficiency. To assess the quality of our framework, we use an open-access in-situ dataset and adopt several competing classification approaches commonly considered for large-scale land cover mapping. We evaluated all approaches through two scenarios: an extrapolation scenario in which training data encompasses samples from all biogeographical regions, and a leave-one-region-out scenario where one region is excluded from training. We also explore the spatial representation learned by our model, highlighting a connection between its internal manifold and the geographical information used during training. Our results demonstrate that integrating geospatial information improves land cover mapping performance, with the most substantial gains achieved by jointly leveraging both fine- and coarse-grained spatial information.
title Geographical Context Matters: Bridging Fine and Coarse Spatial Information to Enhance Continental Land Cover Mapping
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.12368