# Land-Cover Classification with High-Resolution Remote Sensing Images Using Transferable Deep Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1807.05713 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.05713/

## Key facts

- Cited by 119 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 16 Jul 2018.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 119)

- [Scale-MAE: A Scale-Aware Masked Autoencoder for Multiscale Geospatial Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.14532/) (2022)
- [LoveDA: A Remote Sensing Land-Cover Dataset for Domain Adaptive Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.08733/) (2021)
- [UNetFormer: A UNet-like Transformer for Efficient Semantic Segmentation of Remote Sensing Urban Scene Imagery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.08937/) (2021)
- [Vision-Language Models in Remote Sensing: Current Progress and Future Trends](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.05726/) (2023)
- [The Segment Anything Model (SAM) for Remote Sensing Applications: From Zero to One Shot](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.16623/) (2023)
- [TorchGeo: Deep Learning With Geospatial Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.08872/) (2021)
- [MTP: Advancing Remote Sensing Foundation Model via Multi-Task Pretraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.13430/) (2024)
- [Cross-City Matters: A Multimodal Remote Sensing Benchmark Dataset for Cross-City Semantic Segmentation using High-Resolution Domain Adaptation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.16499/) (2023)
- [LSKNet: A Foundation Lightweight Backbone for Remote Sensing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.11735/) (2024)
- [Bi-Temporal Semantic Reasoning for the Semantic Change Detection in HR Remote Sensing Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.06103/) (2021)
- [EarthNets: Empowering AI in Earth Observation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.04936/) (2022)
- [VDD: Varied Drone Dataset for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.13608/) (2023)
- [SAMRS: Scaling-up Remote Sensing Segmentation Dataset with Segment Anything Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.02034/) (2023)
- [Enabling Country-Scale Land Cover Mapping with Meter-Resolution Satellite Imagery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.00727/) (2022)
- [Looking Outside the Window: Wide-Context Transformer for the Semantic Segmentation of High-Resolution Remote Sensing Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.15754/) (2021)
- [DiffCR: A Fast Conditional Diffusion Framework for Cloud Removal from Optical Satellite Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.04417/) (2023)
- [Single-source Domain Expansion Network for Cross-Scene Hyperspectral Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.01634/) (2022)
- [What a MESS: Multi-Domain Evaluation of Zero-Shot Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.15521/) (2023)
- [ABCNet: Attentive Bilateral Contextual Network for Efficient Semantic Segmentation of Fine-Resolution Remote Sensing Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.02531/) (2021)
- [Consecutive Pretraining: A Knowledge Transfer Learning Strategy with Relevant Unlabeled Data for Remote Sensing Domain](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.03860/) (2022)
- [Language-aware Domain Generalization Network for Cross-Scene Hyperspectral Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.02700/) (2022)
- [A Sentinel-2 multi-year, multi-country benchmark dataset for crop classification and segmentation with deep learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.00951/) (2022)
- [Better, Not Just More: Data-Centric Machine Learning for Earth Observation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.05327/) (2023)
- [Vision-Language Modeling Meets Remote Sensing: Models, Datasets and Perspectives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.14361/) (2025)
- [A Survey on Semi-Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.09899/) (2023)
- [SFFNet: A Wavelet-Based Spatial and Frequency Domain Fusion Network for Remote Sensing Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.01992/) (2024)
- [GLH-Water: A Large-Scale Dataset for Global Surface Water Detection in Large-Size Very-High-Resolution Satellite Imagery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.09310/) (2023)
- [PMAA: A Progressive Multi-scale Attention Autoencoder Model for High-performance Cloud Removal from Multi-temporal Satellite Imagery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.16565/) (2023)
- [Generic Knowledge Boosted Pre-training For Remote Sensing Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.04614/) (2024)
- [SegEarth-OV3: Exploring SAM 3 for Open-Vocabulary Semantic Segmentation in Remote Sensing Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.08730/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In recent years, large amount of high spatial-resolution remote sensing (HRRS) images are available for land-cover mapping. However, due to the complex information brought by the increased spatial resolution and the data disturbances caused by different conditions of image acquisition, it is often difficult to find an efficient method for achieving accurate land-cover classification with high-resolution and heterogeneous remote sensing images. In this paper, we propose a scheme to apply deep model obtained from labeled land-cover dataset to classify unlabeled HRRS images. The main idea is to rely on deep neural networks for presenting the contextual information contained in different types of land-covers and propose a pseudo-labeling and sample selection scheme for improving the transferability of deep models. More precisely, a deep Convolutional Neural Networks is first pre-trained with a well-annotated land-cover dataset, referred to as the source data. Then, given a target image with no labels, the pre-trained CNN model is utilized to classify the image in a patch-wise manner. The patches with high confidence are assigned with pseudo-labels and employed as the queries to retrieve related samples from the source data. The pseudo-labels confirmed with the retrieved results are regarded as supervised information for fine-tuning the pre-trained deep model. To obtain a pixel-wise land-cover classification with the target image, we rely on the fine-tuned CNN and develop a hybrid classification by combining patch-wise classification and hierarchical segmentation. In addition, we create a large-scale land-cover dataset containing 150 Gaofen-2 satellite images for CNN pre-training. Experiments on multi-source HRRS images show encouraging results and demonstrate the applicability of the proposed scheme to land-cover classification.