In this paper, we present a patch-based land use and land cover classification approach using Sentinel-2 satellite images. The Sentinel-2 satellite images are openly and freely accessible, and are provided in the earth observation program Copernicus. We present a novel dataset, based on these images that covers 13 spectral bands and is comprised of ten classes with a total of 27 000 labeled and geo-referenced images. Benchmarks are provided for this novel dataset with its spectral bands using state-of-the-art deep convolutional neural networks. An overall classification accuracy of 98.57% was achieved with the proposed novel dataset. The resulting classification system opens a gate toward 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.

Detecting and mapping informal settlements encompasses several of the United Nations sustainable development goals. This is because informal settlements are home to the most socially and economically vulnerable people on the planet. Thus, understanding where these settlements are is of paramount importance to both government and non-government organizations (NGOs), such as the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF), who can use this information to deliver effective social and economic aid. We propose two effective methods for detecting and mapping the locations of informal settlements. One uses only low-resolution (LR), freely available, Sentinel-2 multispectral satellite imagery with noisy annotations, whilst the other is a deep learning approach that uses only costly very-high-resolution (VHR) satellite imagery. To our knowledge, we are the first to map informal settlements successfully with low-resolution satellite imagery. We extensively evaluate and compare the proposed methods. Please find additional material at https://frontierdevelopmentlab.github.io/informal-settlements/.

Accurate crop yield prediction is of utmost importance for informed decision-making in agriculture, aiding farmers, and industry stakeholders. However, this task is complex and depends on multiple factors, such as environmental conditions, soil properties, and management practices. Combining heterogeneous data views poses a fusion challenge, like identifying the view-specific contribution to the predictive task. We present a novel multi-view learning approach to predict crop yield for different crops (soybean, wheat, rapeseed) and regions (Argentina, Uruguay, and Germany). Our multi-view input data includes multi-spectral optical images from Sentinel-2 satellites and weather data as dynamic features during the crop growing season, complemented by static features like soil properties and topographic information. To effectively fuse the data, we introduce a Multi-view Gated Fusion (MVGF) model, comprising dedicated view-encoders and a Gated Unit (GU) module. The view-encoders handle the heterogeneity of data sources with varying temporal resolutions by learning a view-specific representation. These representations are adaptively fused via a weighted sum. The fusion weights are computed for each sample by the GU using a concatenation of the view-representations. The MVGF model is trained at sub-field level with 10 m resolution pixels. Our evaluations show that the MVGF outperforms conventional models on the same task, achieving the best results by incorporating all the data sources, unlike the usual fusion results in the literature. For Argentina, the MVGF model achieves an R2 value of 0.68 at sub-field yield prediction, while at field level evaluation (comparing field averages), it reaches around 0.80 across different countries. The GU module learned different weights based on the country and crop-type, aligning with the variable significance of each data source to the prediction task.

Detecting and mapping informal settlements encompasses several of the United Nations sustainable development goals. This is because informal settlements are home to the most socially and economically vulnerable people on the planet. Thus, understanding where these settlements are is of paramount importance to both government and non-government organizations (NGOs), such as the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF), who can use this information to deliver effective social and economic aid. We propose a method that detects and maps the locations of informal settlements using only freely available, Sentinel-2 low-resolution satellite spectral data and socio-economic data. This is in contrast to previous studies that only use costly very-high resolution (VHR) satellite and aerial imagery. We show how we can detect informal settlements by combining both domain knowledge and machine learning techniques, to build a classifier that looks for known roofing materials used in informal settlements. Please find additional material at https://frontierdevelopmentlab.github.io/informal-settlements/.