Generating 10-Meter Resolution Land Use and Land Cover Products Using Historical Landsat Archive Based on Super Resolution Guided Semantic Segmentation Network

Abstract

Generating high-resolution land cover maps using relatively lower-resolution remote sensing images is of great importance for subtle analysis. However, the domain gap between real lower-resolution and synthetic images has not been permanently resolved. Furthermore, super-resolution information is not fully exploited in semantic segmentation models. By solving the aforementioned issues, a deeply fused super resolution guided semantic segmentation network using 30 m Landsat images is proposed. A large-scale dataset comprising 10 m Sentinel-2, 30 m Landsat-8 images, and 10 m European Space Agency (ESA) Land Cover Product is introduced, facilitating model training and evaluation across diverse real-world scenarios. The proposed Deeply Fused Super Resolution Guided Semantic Segmentation Network (DFSRSSN) combines a Super Resolution Module (SRResNet) and a Semantic Segmentation Module (CRFFNet). SRResNet enhances spatial resolution, while CRFFNet leverages super-resolution information for finer-grained land cover classification. Experimental results demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed method in five different testing datasets, achieving 68.17–83.29% and 39.55–75.92% for overall accuracy and kappa, respectively. When compared to ResUnet with up-sampling block, increases of 2.16–34.27% and 8.32–43.97% were observed for overall accuracy and kappa, respectively. Moreover, we proposed a relative drop rate of accuracy metrics to evaluate the transferability. The model exhibits improved spatial transferability, demonstrating its effectiveness in generating accurate land cover maps for different cities. Multi-temporal analysis reveals the potential of the proposed method for studying land cover and land use changes over time. In addition, a comparison of the state-of-the-art full semantic segmentation models indicates that spatial details are fully exploited and presented in semantic segmentation results by the proposed method.