Transformer models for Land Cover Classification with Satellite Image Time Series

In this paper we address the task of pixel-wise land cover (LC) classification using satellite image time series (SITS). For that purpose, we use a supervised deep learning model and focus on combining spatial and temporal features. Our method is based on the Swin Transformer and captures global temporal features by using self-attention and local spatial features by convolutions. We extend the architecture to receive multi-temporal input to generate one output label map for every input image. In our experiments we focus on the application of pixel-wise LC classification from Sentinel‑2 SITS over the whole area of Lower Saxony (Germany). The experiments with our new model show that by using convolutions for spatial feature extraction or a temporal weighting module in the skip connections the performance improves and is more stable. The combined usage of both adaptations results in the overall best performance although this improvement is only minimal. Compared to a fully convolutional neural network without any self-attention layers our model improves the results by 2.1% in the mean F1-Score on a corrected test dataset. Additionally, we investigate different types of temporal position encoding, which do not have a significant impact on the performance.