Deep Learning for Spatio-Temporal Fusion in Land Surface Temperature Estimation: A Comprehensive Survey, Experimental Analysis, and Future Trends

TL;DR

This paper reviews deep learning-based spatio-temporal fusion methods for Land Surface Temperature estimation, introduces a new dataset for benchmarking, and analyzes the challenges and future directions in thermal data fusion.

Contribution

It provides a focused review, formalizes the task, proposes a taxonomy, and introduces a new dataset for evaluating DL models on LST spatio-temporal fusion.

Findings

Performance gaps identified in current models

Architecture sensitivities analyzed

Open research challenges highlighted

Abstract

Land Surface Temperature (LST) plays a key role in climate monitoring, urban heat assessment, and land-atmosphere interactions. However, current thermal infrared satellite sensors cannot simultaneously achieve high spatial and temporal resolution. Spatio-temporal fusion (STF) techniques address this limitation by combining complementary satellite data, one with high spatial but low temporal resolution, and another with high temporal but low spatial resolution. Existing STF techniques, from classical models to modern deep learning (DL) architectures, were primarily developed for surface reflectance (SR). Their application to thermal data remains limited and often overlooks LST-specific spatial and temporal variability. This study provides a focused review of DL-based STF methods for LST. We present a formal mathematical definition of the thermal fusion task, propose a refined taxonomy of relevant DL methods, and analyze the modifications required when adapting SR-oriented models to LST. To support reproducibility and benchmarking, we introduce a new dataset comprising 51 Terra MODIS-Landsat LST pairs from 2013 to 2024, and evaluate representative models to explore their behavior on thermal data. The analysis highlights performance gaps, architecture sensitivities, and open research challenges. The dataset and accompanying resources are publicly available at https://github.com/Sofianebouaziz1/STF-LST.