Contextual Land-Cover Map Translation with Semantic Segmentation

This paper presents a framework for translating a land-cover map into another one in a supervised way. This links to numerous applications (updating, completion, etc.). Conversely to existing approaches, we jointly perform spatial and semantic transformation without any prior knowledge. The proposed method assumes that: i) examples of the source and target maps already exist, ii) the spatial resolution of the source map is equal or higher than the target one. The translation is performed using an asymmetric Convolutional Neural Network with positional encoding. Experimental results show the effectiveness of the method in retrieving a yearly version of Corine Land Cover (CLC) at country-scale (France) using an existing high-resolution map and with similar accuracy than existing CLC maps (~80%).