Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks for Spatially Independent Multispectral Land Classification

Land classification from satellite imagery is important for land management, environmental monitoring, and urban planning. Machine learning methods such as random forests and multilayer perceptrons have shown strong performance on multispectral data, while the Kolmogorov-Arnold network has emerged as an alternative architecture with compact model structures. This study evaluates the Kolmogorov-Arnold network for land classification using Landsat 8 imagery and compares it with random forest and multilayer perceptron models. The models were trained and tested on data from Edmonton, Alberta and evaluated on an independent dataset from Calgary, Alberta across five land classes: agriculture, urban, water, forest, and bare ground. For the Calgary dataset, the Kolmogorov-Arnold network matched the accuracy of the random forest and outperformed the multilayer perceptron, while requiring substantially fewer trainable parameters and providing greater interpretability.