Regional retrospective high resolution land cover for Ukraine: Methodology and results

In this paper we propose a new methodology to automatically generate retrospective high resolution land cover maps on a regular basis for the whole territory of Ukraine. An ensemble of neural networks, in particular multilayer perceptrons (MLPs), is used for multi-temporal Landsat-4/5/7 satellites imagery classification with previously restored missing data due to clouds, shadows and non-regular coverage. This methodology was used to obtain land cover maps for the territory of Ukraine for three decades, namely 1990s, 2000s and 2010s, with overall accuracy more than 97%.