Fusing Multi-seasonal Sentinel-2 Imagery for Urban Land Cover Classification with Multibranch Residual Convolutional Neural Networks

Abstract

Exploiting multitemporal Sentinel-2 images for urban land cover classification has become an important research topic, since these images have become globally available at relatively fine temporal resolution, thus offering great potential for large-scale land cover mapping. However, appropriate exploitation of the images needs to address problems such as cloud cover inherent to optical satellite imagery. To this end, we propose a simple yet effective decision-level fusion approach for urban land cover prediction from multiseasonal Sentinel-2 images, using the state-of-the-art residual convolutional neural networks (ResNet). We extensively tested the approach in a cross-validation manner over a seven-city study area in central Europe. Both quantitative and qualitative results demonstrated the superior performance of the proposed fusion approach over several baseline approaches, including observation- and feature-level fusion.