In this paper, we address the challenge of land use and land cover classification using Sentinel-2 satellite images. The Sentinel-2 satellite images are openly and freely accessible provided in the Earth observation program Copernicus. We present a novel dataset based on Sentinel-2 satellite images covering 13 spectral bands and consisting out of 10 classes with in total 27,000 labeled and geo-referenced images. We provide benchmarks for this novel dataset with its spectral bands using state-of-the-art deep Convolutional Neural Network (CNNs). With the proposed novel dataset, we achieved an overall classification accuracy of 98.57%. The resulting classification system opens a gate towards a number of Earth observation applications. We demonstrate how this classification system can be used for detecting land use and land cover changes and how it can assist in improving geographical maps. The geo-referenced dataset EuroSAT is made publicly available at https://github.com/phelber/eurosat.

The increased availability of high resolution satellite imagery allows to sense very detailed structures on the surface of our planet. Access to such information opens up new directions in the analysis of remote sensing imagery. However, at the same time this raises a set of new challenges for existing pixel-based prediction methods, such as semantic segmentation approaches. While deep neural networks have achieved significant advances in the semantic segmentation of high resolution images in the past, most of the existing approaches tend to produce predictions with poor boundaries. In this paper, we address the problem of preserving semantic segmentation boundaries in high resolution satellite imagery by introducing a new cascaded multi-task loss. We evaluate our approach on Inria Aerial Image Labeling Dataset which contains large-scale and high resolution images. Our results show that we are able to outperform state-of-the-art methods by 8.3% without any additional post-processing step.

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Informal settlements are home to the most socially and economically vulnerable people on the planet. In order to deliver effective economic and social aid, non-government organizations (NGOs), such as the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF), require detailed maps of the locations of informal settlements. However, data regarding informal and formal settlements is primarily unavailable and if available is often incomplete. This is due, in part, to the cost and complexity of gathering data on a large scale. To address these challenges, we, in this work, provide three contributions. 1) A brand new machine learning data-set, purposely developed for informal settlement detection. 2) We show that it is possible to detect informal settlements using freely available low-resolution (LR) data, in contrast to previous studies that use very-high resolution (VHR) * Both authors contributed equally to this research. satellite and aerial imagery, something that is cost-prohibitive for NGOs. 3) We demonstrate two effective classification schemes on our curated data set, one that is cost-efficient for NGOs and another that is cost-prohibitive for NGOs, but has additional utility. We integrate these schemes into a semi-automated pipeline that converts either a LR or VHR satellite image into a binary map that encodes the locations of informal settlements.

The integration of information acquired with different modalities, spatial resolution and spectral bands has shown to improve predictive accuracies. Data fusion is therefore one of the key challenges in remote sensing. Most prior work focusing on multi-modal fusion, assumes that modalities are always available during inference. This assumption limits the applications of multi-modal models since in practice the data collection process is likely to generate data with missing, incomplete or corrupted modalities. In this paper, we show that Generative Adversarial Networks can be effectively used to overcome the problems that arise when modalities are missing or incomplete. Focusing on semantic segmentation of building footprints with missing modalities, our approach achieves an improvement of about 2% on the Intersection over Union (IoU) against the same network that relies only on the available modality.