A large-scale climate-aware satellite image dataset for domain adaptive land-cover semantic segmentation

Songlin Liu, Linwei Chen, Li Zhang, Jun Hu, Ying Fu

A few well-annotated datasets for land-cover semantic segmentation have recently been introduced to advance the field of earth observation technologies. However, these datasets overlook the significant diversity among geographic areas with different climates, which can greatly impact and diversify land cover. Consequently, this leads to a domain gap in remote sensing images and severe performance degradation of the segmentation models. To enhance land-cover semantic segmentation with improved generalization ability, we conducted the first investigation into the impact of climate on this task. In this paper, we present a unique large-scale Climate-Aware Satellite Images Dataset (CASID) specifically designed for domain adaptive land-cover semantic segmentation. It consists of 980 satellite images with a size of 5000 x 5000 pixels, collected from 30 different regions around Asia, covering over 24,500 square kilometers. These images are gathered from four distinct climate zones, namely temperate monsoon, subtropical monsoon, tropical monsoon, and tropical rainforest. It includes four sub-datasets/domains, each representing one of the aforementioned climate zones. This characteristic…