Toward a Yearly Country-Scale CORINE Land-Cover Map without Using Images: A Map Translation Approach

• Main Authors: Luc Baudoux, Jordi Inglada, Clément Mallet
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: MDPI AG 2021-03-01
• Series: Remote Sensing
• Subjects: land cover; mapping; translation; nomenclature; Convolutional Neural Network; geographical encoding
• Online Access: https://www.mdpi.com/2072-4292/13/6/1060

CORINE Land-Cover (CLC) and its by-products are considered as a reference baseline for land-cover mapping over Europe and subsequent applications. CLC is currently tediously produced each six years from both the visual interpretation and the automatic analysis of a large amount of remote sensing images. Observing that various European countries regularly produce in parallel their own land-cover country-scaled maps with their own specifications, we propose to directly infer CORINE Land-Cover from an existing map, therefore steadily decreasing the updating time-frame. No additional remote sensing image is required. In this paper, we focus more specifically on translating a country-scale remote sensed map, OSO (France), into CORINE Land Cover, in a supervised way. OSO and CLC not only differ in nomenclature but also in spatial resolution. We jointly harmonize both dimensions using a contextual and asymmetrical Convolution Neural Network with positional encoding. We show for various use cases that our method achieves a superior performance than the traditional semantic-based translation approach, achieving an 81% accuracy over all of France, close to the targeted 85% accuracy of CLC.