Sen4Map: Advancing Mapping With Sentinel-2 by Providing Detailed Semantic Descriptions and Customizable Land-Use and Land-Cover Data

Abstract

This paper presents Sen4Map, a large-scale benchmark dataset designed to enhance the capability of generating land-cover maps using Sentinel-2 data. Comprising non-overlapping <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$64\times 64$</tex-math></inline-formula> patches extracted from Sentinel-2 time series images, the dataset spans 335,125 geo-tagged locations across the European Union. These locations are associated with detailed land-cover and land-use information gathered by expert surveyors in 2018. Unlike most existing large datasets available in the literature, the presented database provides: (1) a detailed description of the land-cover and land-use properties of each sampled area; (2) independence of scale, as it is associated with reference data collected <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">in-situ</i> by expert surveyors; (3) the ability to test both temporal and spatial classification approaches because of the availability of time series of <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$64\times 64$</tex-math></inline-formula> patches associated with each labeled sample; and (4) samples were collected following a stratified random sample design to obtain a statistically representative spatial distribution of land-cover classes throughout the European Union. To showcase the properties and challenges offered by Sen4Map, we benchmarked the current state-of-the-art land-cover classification approaches. The dataset and code can be downloaded at: https://datapub.fz-juelich.de/sen4map.