A Cross-Modal Deep Feature Fusion Framework Based on Ensemble Learning 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.