Temporal Sensitivity Analysis of Tessera Embeddings

Abstract

Many Earth Observation applications need land-use/land-cover maps that are both precise and frequently updated, yet the strongest Earth Observation foundation models build their embeddings from a full year of observations. We present a controlled study of the temporal sensitivity of Tessera, one of these leading foundation models, for land-use/land-cover mapping. Keeping the encoder frozen, we recompute its embeddings over varying observation windows, from a full year down to a single day. We use them as inputs to a linear probe and a UNet segmentation head, benchmarking both of them against from-scratch networks on LUCAS, DynamicEarthNet, and PASTIS-R datasets. We show that the value of the embeddings is task-dependent. Where classes are separated by phenology, as for the crop types of PASTIS-R, they reach a mean Intersection-over-Union of $58.3$, about $46\%$ above the best from-scratch model. Where classes are temporally stable (e.g., forests in DynamicEarthNet and LUCAS), embedding-based and from-scratch models match only under full supervision. On both datasets, Tessera embeddings remain markedly more label-efficient. Degradation under shorter temporal windows is gradual and class-dependent. Contracting the window from one year to one month costs $39\%$ of the segmentation accuracy on PASTIS-R but only $5\%$ on DynamicEarthNet. Single-day embeddings still classify land cover in LUCAS at $3.4$ times the chance level. Our study shows that temporal coverage is therefore a tunable cost rather than a fixed prerequisite, opening regimes such as near-real-time mapping and faster land-use/land-cover refresh cycles.