Urban land use mapping is crucial for effective urban management and planning due to the rapid change of urban processes. State-of-the-art approaches rely heavily on the socioeconomic, topographical, infrastructural and land cover information of urban environments via feeding them into ad hoc classifiers for land use classification. Yet, the major challenge lies in the lack of a universal and reliable approach for the extraction and combination of physical and socioeconomic features derived from remote sensing imagery and social sensing data. This article proposes an ensemble-learning-approach-based solution of integrating a rich body of features derived from high resolution satellite images, street-view images, building footprints, points-of-interest (POIs) and social media check-ins for the urban land use mapping task. The proposed approach can statistically differentiate the importance of input feature variables and provides a good explanation for the relationships between land cover, socioeconomic activities and land use categories. We apply the proposed method to infer the land use distribution in fine-grained spatial granularity within the Fifth Ring Road of Beijing and achieve an average classification accuracy of 74.2% over nine typical land use types. The results also indicate that our model outperforms several alternative models that have been widely utilized as baselines for land use classification.

Land use classification based on multi-modal data fusion has gained significant attention due to its potential to capture the complex characteristics of urban environments. However, effectively extracting and integrating discriminative features derived from heterogeneous geospatial data remain challenging. This study proposes an ensemble learning framework for land use classification by fusing cross-modal deep features from both physical and socioeconomic perspectives. Specifically, the framework utilizes the Masked Autoencoder (MAE) to extract global spatial dependencies from remote sensing imagery and applies long short-term memory (LSTM) networks to model spatial distribution patterns of points of interest (POIs) based on type co-occurrence. Furthermore, we employ inter-modal contrastive learning to enhance the representation of physical and socioeconomic features. To verify the superiority of the ensemble learning framework, we apply it to map the land use distribution of Bejing. By coupling various physical and socioeconomic features, the framework achieves an average accuracy of 84.33 %, surpassing several comparative baseline methods. Furthermore, the framework demonstrates comparable performance when applied to a Shenzhen dataset, confirming its robustness and generalizability. The findings highlight the importance of fully extracting and effectively integrating multi-source deep features in land use classification, providing a robust solution for urban planning and sustainable development.