$T^{3}S$: Think in Thermal Time for Generalizable Crop Mapping from Satellite Image Time Series

arXiv:2506.12885v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Crop type classification from optical satellite time series remains limited in its ability to generalize across growing seasons, particularly when crop phenology shifts due to inter-annual weather variability. This hampers deployment in operational settings where current-year labels are unavailable. In addition, uncertainty quantification is often overlooked, reducing the reliability of such approaches for practical crop monitoring. Inspired by ecophysiological principles, we introduce Thermal Time-based Temporal Sampling ($T^3S$), a simple, model-agnostic method that replaces calendar time with thermal time. By re-indexing satellite observations by cumulative growing degree days, $T^3S$ aligns phenologically equivalent growth stages across years, reducing temporal redundancy while concentrating on the most biologically informative periods. We evaluate $T^3S$ across three architecturally distinct backbones on (i) SwissCrop, a new country-scale, multi-year Sentinel-2 dataset with paired temperature data that we publicly release, and (ii) the cross-region TimeMatch benchmark spanning Denmark and France. Across these settings, $T^3S$ consistently improves cross-year and cross-region crop classification over several state-of-the-art baselines, including thermal positional encoding, with particularly strong gains in uncertainty calibration, robustness under label scarcity, and early-season prediction, while requiring no architectural modification.