Segmenting France Across Four Centuries

Historical maps offer an invaluable perspective into territory evolution across past centuries--long before satellite or remote sensing technologies existed. Deep learning methods have shown promising results in segmenting historical maps, but publicly available datasets typically focus on a single map type or period, require extensive and costly annotations, and are not suited for nationwide, long-term analyses. In this paper, we introduce a new dataset of historical maps tailored for analyzing large-scale, long-term land use and land cover evolution with limited annotations. Spanning metropolitan France (548,305 km^2), our dataset contains three map collections from the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries. We provide both comprehensive modern labels and 22,878 km^2 of manually annotated historical labels for the 18th and 19th century maps. Our dataset illustrates the complexity of the segmentation task, featuring stylistic inconsistencies, interpretive ambiguities, and significant landscape changes (e.g., marshlands disappearing in favor of forests). We assess the difficulty of these challenges by benchmarking three approaches: a fully-supervised model trained with historical labels, and two weakly-supervised models that rely only on modern annotations. The latter either use the modern labels directly or first perform image-to-image translation to address the stylistic gap between historical and contemporary maps. Finally, we discuss how these methods can support long-term environment monitoring, offering insights into centuries of landscape transformation. Our official project repository is publicly available at https://github.com/Archiel19/FRAx4.git.