A1 Refereed original research article in a scientific journal
GeoFusion: A hybrid convolutional neural network-transformer model for boreal peatland classification; 
Authors: Farahnakian, Fahimeh; Zelioli, Luca; Farahnakian, Farshad; Middleton, Maarit; Sheikh, Javad; Heikkonen, Jukka
Publisher: Elsevier
Publication year: 2026
Journal: Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence
Article number: 115118
Volume: 178
ISSN: 0952-1976
eISSN: 1873-6769
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.engappai.2026.115118
Publication's open availability at the time of reporting: Open Access
Publication channel's open availability : Partially Open Access publication channel
Web address : https://doi.org/10.1016/j.engappai.2026.115118
Self-archived copy’s web address: https://research.utu.fi/converis/portal/detail/Publication/526925405
Self-archived copy's licence: CC BY
Self-archived copy's version: Publisher`s PDF
The generation of high-resolution boreal peatland maps through the integration of multi-source remote sensing data provides critical support for greenhouse gas inventories and environmental management. In this study, we propose GeoFusion, a pixel-wise peatland classification architecture that leverages open-access radar imagery from Sentinel-1 and optical imagery from Sentinel-2. GeoFusion combines convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for hierarchical local feature extraction with vision transformers (ViTs) for modeling long-range dependencies, enabling effective fusion of spectral–textural and structural information. The architecture also incorporates data augmentation, multi-head self-attention, and dropout regularization to enhance robustness and mitigate overfitting. Performance was assessed at two classification levels: site type and fertility level, capturing both ecological diversity and functional characteristics of complex peatland ecosystems. Comparative experiments against well-known deep learning models and hybrid Transformer-based models were conducted across three ecologically distinct regions in Finland. The obtained results demonstrate that GeoFusion outperforms other models and achieves average accuracies of 79.25% and 72.68% for fertility-level and site-type predictions, respectively.
Keywords:
deep learning, Environmental monitoring and management, multi-sensor fusion, Peatland classification, Vision transformers
Downloadable publication This is an electronic reprint of the original article. |
Funding information in the publication:
This work is part of the Advances in Soil Information- MaaTi project funded by the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry of Finland (2021–2022, funding decision VN/27416/2020-MMM-2).