Mapping and analyzing the local climate zones in China’s 32 major cities using Landsat imagery based on a novel convolutional neural network

The Local Climate Zone (LCZ) scheme provides researchers with a standard method to monitor the Urban Heat Island (UHI) effect and conduct temperature studies. How to generate reliable LCZ maps has therefore become a research focus. In recent years, researchers have attempted to use Landsat imagery to delineate LCZs and generate maps worldwide based on the World Urban Database and Access Portal Tools (WUDAPT). However, the mapping results obtained by the WUDAPT method are not satisfactory. In this paper, to generate more accurate LCZ maps, we propose a novel Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) model (namely, LCZ-CNN), which is designed to cope with the issues of LCZ classification using Landsat imagery. Furthermore, in this study, we applied the LCZ-CNN model to generate LCZ mapping results for China’s 32 major cities distributed in various climatic zones, achieving a significantly better accuracy than the traditional classification strategies and a satisfactory computational efficiency. The proposed LCZ-CNN model achieved satisfactory classification accuracies in all 32 cities, and the Overall Accuracies (OAs) of more than half of the cities were higher than 80%. We also designed a series of experiments to comprehensively analyze the proposed LCZ-CNN model, with regard to the transferability of the network and the effectiveness of multi-seasonal information. It was found that the first convolutional stage, corresponding to low-level features, shows better transferability than the second and third convolutional stages, which extract high-level and more image- or task-oriented features. It was also confirmed that the multi-seasonal information can improve the accuracy of LCZ classification. The thermal characteristics of the different LCZ classes were also analyzed based on the mapping results for China’s 32 major cities, and the experimental results confirmed the close relationship between the LCZ classes and the magnitude of the Land Surface Temperature (LST).