# BD Open LULC Map: High-resolution land use land cover mapping & benchmarking for urban development in Dhaka, Bangladesh

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.21915 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.21915/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 7 of its 19 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 28 May 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [Encoder-Decoder with Atrous Separable Convolution for Semantic Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.02611/) (2018)
- [FloodNet: A High Resolution Aerial Imagery Dataset for Post Flood Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.02951/) (2020)
- [Land-Cover Classification with High-Resolution Remote Sensing Images Using Transferable Deep Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.05713/) (2018)
- [OpenEarthMap: A Benchmark Dataset for Global High-Resolution Land Cover Mapping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.10732/) (2022)
- [DynamicEarthNet: Daily Multi-Spectral Satellite Dataset for Semantic Change Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.12560/) (2022)
- [SCAttNet: Semantic Segmentation Network with Spatial and Channel Attention Mechanism for High-Resolution Remote Sensing Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.09121/) (2019)
- [LandCoverNet: A global benchmark land cover classification training dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.03111/) (2020)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Land Use Land Cover (LULC) mapping using deep learning significantly enhances the reliability of LULC classification, aiding in understanding geography, socioeconomic conditions, poverty levels, and urban sprawl. However, the scarcity of annotated satellite data, especially in South/East Asian developing countries, poses a major challenge due to limited funding, diverse infrastructures, and dense populations. In this work, we introduce the BD Open LULC Map (BOLM), providing pixel-wise LULC annotations across eleven classes (e.g., Farmland, Water, Forest, Urban Structure, Rural Built-Up) for Dhaka metropolitan city and its surroundings using high-resolution Bing satellite imagery (2.22 m/pixel). BOLM spans 4,392 sq km (891 million pixels), with ground truth validated through a three-stage process involving GIS experts. We benchmark LULC segmentation using DeepLab V3+ across five major classes and compare performance on Bing and Sentinel-2A imagery. BOLM aims to support reliable deep models and domain adaptation tasks, addressing critical LULC dataset gaps in South/East Asia.