  Historical maps provide useful spatio-temporal information on the Earth's
surface before modern earth observation techniques came into being. To extract
information from maps, neural networks, which gain wide popularity in recent
years, have replaced hand-crafted map processing methods and tedious manual
labor. However, aleatoric uncertainty, known as data-dependent uncertainty,
inherent in the drawing/scanning/fading defects of the original map sheets and
inadequate contexts when cropping maps into small tiles considering the memory
limits of the training process, challenges the model to make correct
predictions. As aleatoric uncertainty cannot be reduced even with more training
data collected, we argue that complementary spatio-temporal contexts can be
helpful. To achieve this, we propose a U-Net-based network that fuses
spatio-temporal features with cross-attention transformers (U-SpaTem),
aggregating information at a larger spatial range as well as through a temporal
sequence of images. Our model achieves a better performance than other
state-or-art models that use either temporal or spatial contexts. Compared with
pure vision transformers, our model is more lightweight and effective. To the
best of our knowledge, leveraging both spatial and temporal contexts have been
rarely explored before in the segmentation task. Even though our application is
on segmenting historical maps, we believe that the method can be transferred
into other fields with similar problems like temporal sequences of satellite
images. Our code is freely accessible at
https://github.com/chenyizi086/wu.2023.sigspatial.git.
