Spatial Resolution Enhancement for Large-Scale Land Cover Mapping via Weakly Supervised Deep Learning

Multispectral satellite imagery is the primary data source for monitoring land cover change and characterizing land cover globally. However, the consistency of land cover monitoring is limited by the spatial and temporal resolutions of the acquired satellite images. The public availability of daily high-resolution images is still scarce. This paper aims to fill this gap by proposing a novel spatiotemporal fusion method to enhance daily low spatial resolution land cover mapping using a weakly supervised deep convolutional neural network. We merge Sentinel images and moderate resolution imaging spectroradiometer (MODIS )-derived thematic land cover maps under the application background of massive remote sensing data and the large spatial resolution gaps between MODIS data and Sentinel images. The neural network training was conducted on the public data set SEN12MS, while the validation and testing used ground truth data from the 2020 IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Society data fusion contest. The proposed data fusion method shows that the synthesized land cover map has significantly higher spatial resolution than the corresponding MODIS-derived land cover map. The ensemble approach can be implemented for generating high-resolution time series of satellite images by fusing fine images from Sentinel-1 and -2 and daily coarse images from MODIS.