# Deep Learning for Spatio-Temporal Fusion in Land Surface Temperature Estimation: A Comprehensive Survey, Experimental Analysis, and Future Trends

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.16631 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.16631/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 40 of its 216 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 21 Dec 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 40)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [Batch Normalization: Accelerating Deep Network Training by Reducing Internal Covariate Shift](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.03167/) (2015)
- [Training data-efficient image transformers & distillation through attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.12877/) (2020)
- [Learning Phrase Representations using RNN Encoder-Decoder for Statistical Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1406.1078/) (2014)
- [Conditional Generative Adversarial Nets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.1784/) (2014)
- [Unsupervised Representation Learning with Deep Convolutional Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.06434/) (2015)
- [Pyramid Vision Transformer: A Versatile Backbone for Dense Prediction without Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.12122/) (2021)
- [Photo-Realistic Single Image Super-Resolution Using a Generative Adversarial Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.04802/) (2016)
- [Spectral Normalization for Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.05957/) (2018)
- [Group Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.08494/) (2018)
- [Instance Normalization: The Missing Ingredient for Fast Stylization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.08022/) (2016)
- [Pre-Trained Image Processing Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.00364/) (2020)
- [InfoGAN: Interpretable Representation Learning by Information Maximizing Generative Adversarial Nets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.03657/) (2016)
- [Transformer in Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00112/) (2021)
- [Twins: Revisiting the Design of Spatial Attention in Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.13840/) (2021)
- [A Systematic Evaluation of Large Language Models of Code](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.13169/) (2022)
- [Adversarial Feature Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.09782/) (2016)
- [Generative Visual Manipulation on the Natural Image Manifold](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.03552/) (2016)
- [Adversarially Learned Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.00704/) (2016)
- [Deep Generative Image Models using a Laplacian Pyramid of Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.05751/) (2015)
- [Multi-Scale Vision Longformer: A New Vision Transformer for High-Resolution Image Encoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.15358/) (2021)
- [Image De-raining Using a Conditional Generative Adversarial Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1701.05957/) (2017)
- [Variable Rate Image Compression with Recurrent Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.06085/) (2015)
- [VOLO: Vision Outlooker for Visual Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.13112/) (2021)
- [Adversarial Variational Bayes: Unifying Variational Autoencoders and Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1701.04722/) (2017)
- [Vision-Language Models in Remote Sensing: Current Progress and Future Trends](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.05726/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [FuseTen: A Generative Model for Daily 10 m Land Surface Temperature Estimation from Spatio-Temporal Satellite Observations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.23154/) (2025)
- [WGAST: Weakly-Supervised Generative Network for Daily 10 m Land Surface Temperature Estimation via Spatio-Temporal Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.06485/) (2025)
- [Four decades of circumpolar super-resolved satellite land surface temperature data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.17134/) (2025)
- [Uncertainty-Aware Test-Time Adaptation for Cross-Region Spatio-Temporal Fusion of Land Surface Temperature](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.04153/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Land Surface Temperature (LST) plays a key role in climate monitoring, urban heat assessment, and land-atmosphere interactions. However, current thermal infrared satellite sensors cannot simultaneously achieve high spatial and temporal resolution. Spatio-temporal fusion (STF) techniques address this limitation by combining complementary satellite data, one with high spatial but low temporal resolution, and another with high temporal but low spatial resolution. Existing STF techniques, from classical models to modern deep learning (DL) architectures, were primarily developed for surface reflectance (SR). Their application to thermal data remains limited and often overlooks LST-specific spatial and temporal variability. This study provides a focused review of DL-based STF methods for LST. We present a formal mathematical definition of the thermal fusion task, propose a refined taxonomy of relevant DL methods, and analyze the modifications required when adapting SR-oriented models to LST. To support reproducibility and benchmarking, we introduce a new dataset comprising 51 Terra MODIS-Landsat LST pairs from 2013 to 2024, and evaluate representative models to explore their behavior on thermal data. The analysis highlights performance gaps, architecture sensitivities, and open research challenges. The dataset and accompanying resources are publicly available at https://github.com/Sofianebouaziz1/STF-LST.