Abstract
Continuous monitoring of the Amazon biome demands land cover classification models that are both highly sensitive and computationally feasible. To resolve the inherent trade-off between architectural complexity and predictive performance in spatial deep learning, this study introduces the Vision Transformer–Graph Neural Network with Feature Adaptation (ViT-GNN RFFA). In contrast to conventional end-to-end pixel models, this hybrid architecture operates exclusively on an 11-dimensional vector of extracted color-based vegetation indices (e.g., GRVI) and textural statistics. The dual-branch design isolates global sequence context via the ViT module while leveraging the GNN branch as a structural prior to learn non-linear covariance between specific features. Evaluated against a suite of benchmarks including MiniViT, Baseline CNN, Random Forest, XGBoost, and LightGBM, the proposed algorithm attained the highest Overall Accuracy of 0.930 utilizing merely 16,323 trainable parameters—a nearly 75% reduction in footprint versus pixel-based models. Crucially, a McNemar’s statistical test confirmed that the accuracy gain over the strongest classical baseline (XGBoost, OA: 0.927) is statistically significant (p < 0.05). By pairing rigorous spatial cross-validation with an interpretable feature space, this work establishes that intelligent data pre-processing combined with graph-based relational learning offers a robust framework for high-precision environmental mapping under severe resource limitations.
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Sugiharto, W.H., Ghozali, M.I. & Murti, A.C. A lightweight hybrid ViT-GNN framework for data-centric land cover mapping in the amazon biome using graph structural priors.
Sci Rep (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-026-59674-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-026-59674-6
Keywords
- Amazon biome
- Land cover classification
- Hybrid deep learning
- Feature engineering
- Computational efficiency
Source: Ecology - nature.com
