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

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.12368 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.12368/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 14 of its 79 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 16 Apr 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 14 of 14)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
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- [TabPFN: A Transformer That Solves Small Tabular Classification Problems in a Second](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.01848/) (2022)
- [SatCLIP: Global, General-Purpose Location Embeddings with Satellite Imagery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17179/) (2023)
- [Mission Critical -- Satellite Data is a Distinct Modality in Machine Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.01444/) (2024)
- [Satellite Image Time Series Classification with Pixel-Set Encoders and Temporal Self-Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.07757/) (2019)
- [Geographic Location Encoding with Spherical Harmonics and Sinusoidal Representation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.06743/) (2023)
- [Sphere2Vec: A General-Purpose Location Representation Learning over a Spherical Surface for Large-Scale Geospatial Predictions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.17624/) (2023)
- [From parcel to continental scale -- A first European crop type map based on Sentinel-1 and LUCAS Copernicus in-situ observations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.09261/) (2021)
- [POEM: Polarization of Embeddings for Domain-Invariant Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.13046/) (2023)
- [Reuse out-of-year data to enhance land cover mapping via feature disentanglement and contrastive learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.11114/) (2024)
- [Can Location Embeddings Enhance Super-Resolution of Satellite Imagery?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.15847/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

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.