Invariant Features for Global Crop Type Classification

Abstract

Accurate global crop type mapping supports agricultural monitoring and food security, yet remains limited by the scarcity of labeled data in many regions. A key challenge is enabling models trained in one geography to generalize reliably to others despite shifts in climate, phenology, and spectral characteristics. In this work, we show that geographic transfer in crop classification is primarily governed by the ability to learn invariant structure in multispectral time series. To systematically study this, we introduce CropGlobe, a globally distributed benchmark dataset of 300,000 samples spanning eight countries and five continents, and define progressively harder transfer settings from cross-country to cross-hemisphere. Across all settings, we find that simple spectral-temporal representations outperform both handcrafted features and modern geospatial foundation model embeddings. We propose CropNet, a lightweight convolutional architecture that jointly convolves across spectral and temporal dimensions to learn invariant crop signatures. Despite its simplicity, CropNet consistently outperforms larger transformer-based and foundation-model approaches under geographic domain shift. To further improve robustness to geographic variation, we introduce augmentations that simulate shifts in crop phenology and reflectance. Combined with CropNet, this yields substantial gains under large domain shifts. Our results demonstrate that inductive bias toward joint spectral-temporal structure is more critical for transfer than model scale or pretraining, pointing toward a scalable and data-efficient paradigm for worldwide agricultural mapping. Data and code are available at https://github.com/x-ytong/CropNet/.