Ground-to-Satellite Knowledge Distillation for Crop Classification under Temporal and Geographic Shift
Abstract: Continuous and up-to-date crop type mapping is essential for agricultural monitoring but is often hampered by limited reference data. The growing availability of ground-level field photographs offers a promising way to address this challenge. When combined with satellite time series, these images provide complementary perspectives on the same parcel, capturing crop characteristics from distinctly different perspectives. However, field photographs are not always available for each satellite pixel at inference time, limiting their potential in scalable crop type mapping. We investigate whether ground photographs can provide privileged supervision for crop classification built on pretrained satellite embeddings. A photo teacher based on frozen CLIP features supervises classifiers trained on AlphaEarth and TESSERA representations; photographs are used only during training. On a paired field photo and satellite imagery dataset with 17 crop classes, knowledge distillation consistently improves over satellite-only classification; for frozen embeddings the margin grows under temporal shift, reaching up to +5.5 macro-F1 points, and widens in geographic holdouts (+3.7 vs +3.0 in-distribution). These results show that ground-view supervision can complement satellite embeddings and improve their robustness without changing inference requirements.