Enhancing High-Resolution Land Cover Classification Using Multi-Level Cross-Modal Attention Fusion

High-precision land cover classification is fundamental to environmental monitoring, urban planning, and sustainable land-use management. With the growing availability of multimodal remote sensing data, combining spectral and structural information has become an effective strategy for improving classification performance in complex high-resolution scenes. However, most existing methods predominantly rely on shallow feature concatenation, which fails to capture long-range dependencies and cross-modal interactions that are critical for distinguishing fine-grained land cover categories. This study proposes a multi-level cross-modal attention fusion network, Cross-Modal Cross-Attention UNet (CMCAUNet), which integrates a Cross-Modal Cross-Attention Fusion (CMCA) module and a Skip-Connection Attention Gate (SCAG) module. The CMCA module progressively enhances multimodal feature representations throughout the encoder, while the SCAG module leverages high-level semantics to refine spatial details during decoding and improve boundary delineation. Together, these modules enable more effective integration of spectral–textural and structural information. Experiments conducted on the ISPRS Vaihingen and Potsdam datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach. CMCAUNet achieves an mean Intersection over Union (mIoU) ratio of 81.49% and 84.76%, with Overall Accuracy (OA) of 90.74% and 90.28%, respectively. The model also shows superior performance in small object classification, with targets like “Car,” achieving 90.85% and 96.98% OA for the “Car” category. Ablation studies further confirm that the combination of CMCA and SCAG modules significantly improves feature discriminability and leads to more accurate and detailed land cover maps.