Evaluating Google AlphaEarth and Landsat 8/9 Multisource Data Using Random Forest, Rotation Forest, and Canonical Correlation Forest for Enhanced Land Cover Classification

Land cover classification is undergoing a major shift driven by advances in Earth observation and machine learning. While Landsat 8 and Landsat 9 continue to provide reliable, physically interpretable, and openly accessible multispectral data, emerging AI-based foundation models such as Google’s AlphaEarth offer a contrasting paradigm built on high-dimensional satellite embeddings. This study addresses a critical gap in current scholarship—the lack of controlled, classifier-agnostic comparisons between traditional multispectral data and foundation model-generated embeddings—through an empirical evaluation of Landsat 8, Landsat 9, and Google Satellite Embeddings V1 for land cover classification across four LULC classes (Urban, Vegetation, Water, and Bare Land) in the Tema Municipal Area, Ghana. A stratified random sample of 339 reference points was partitioned into 70% for training (240 samples) and 30% for independent holdout validation (99 samples), maintaining a consistent split across all datasets and classifiers. Three ensemble classifiers were tested at a common 30 m analysis grid: Random Forest (RF), Rotation Forest (RotFor), and Canonical Correlation Forest (CCF). Results showed that AlphaEarth embeddings outperformed the Landsat datasets across all classifiers. CCF achieved the highest performance on AlphaEarth with an Overall Accuracy (OA) of 98.3% and a Kappa coefficient of 0.977. RF and RotFor achieved OAs of 97.25% (Kappa 0.963) and 98.05% (Kappa 0.974), respectively. Landsat 8 produced lower accuracies, with RF at 92.85% (Kappa 0.90), RotFor at 93.40% (Kappa 0.91), and CCF at 95.10% (Kappa 0.93). Landsat 9 performed slightly below Landsat 8 in our experiments. We attribute this to the selection of acquisition dates and differences in QA_PIXEL masking effectiveness. Landsat 9 produced an OA of 90.6% with RF (Kappa 0.87), RotFor at 91.15% (Kappa 0.88), and CCF at 91.9% (Kappa 0.89).