IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Magazine - December 2017 - 110

TECHNICAL COMMITTEES
DEVIS TUIA, GABRIELE MOSER, BERTRAND LE SAUX,
BENJAMIN BECHTEL, AND LINDA SEE

The 2017 IEEE Geoscience and Remote
Sensing Society Data Fusion Contest: Open Data
for Global Multimodal Land Use Classification

T

he Image Analysis and Data Fusion Technical Committee (IADF
TC) of the IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Society (GRSS) organizes a Data Fusion Contest every
year. The contest aims to promote
new remote-sensing technologies
and the use of multimodal data to
stimulate methodological developments for extracting geospatial information [1]-[11].
THE 2017 DATA FUSION CONTEST
The 2017 GRSS Data Fusion Contest posed the problem of jointly using data from open
and globally available sources. It focused on the classification of land use, specifically under the framework
of local climate zones (LCZs) [12], [13], a generic climate-based typology of urban and natural landscapes
that supplies information about the basic physical
properties of an area for land use planners and climate
modelers (Figure 1).
LCZs move the task at hand beyond the simple classification of materials: LCZ classes are naturally defined at
hundreds of meters to kilometers in scale because they are
differentiated by the spatial organization and density of
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MGRS.2017.2760346
Date of publication: 27 December 2017

110



urban objects within the zone being
studied. In other words, because all
LCZ urban classes include, for example, buildings and trees, what differentiates them is the number of these
objects present, their volume, and
the distances between individual objects. For this reason, LCZs cannot be
tackled successfully by considering
only pixel spectra.
As a way of encouraging participants to propose new solutions to
the LCZ classification problem, the
2017 contest provided two kinds of
data: high-resolution optical r-emote-sensing images (acquired by Landsat and S- entinel-2) and vector layers from
OpenStreetMap (OSM) depicting the fine-grained distribution of objects of interest, such as buildings and streets.
With these two sources of data at hand, participants could
tackle the LCZ problem from a multimodal perspective,
where more discriminant information about each zone
could be extracted with data fusion strategies. Figure 2
provides a snapshot of the data available for the city of
Paris, France. Participants could also use alternative data
sources that are open and globally available but were not
permitted to use proprietary data.
To go beyond the multimodal classification exercise,
the 2017 contest was also designed to tackle one of the
burning problems in LCZ classification: the generalization

IEEE GEOSCIENCE AND REMOTE SENSING MAGAZINE

DECEMBER 2017



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