Mapping of plastic greenhouses and mulching films from very high resolution remote sensing imagery based on a dilated and non-local convolutional neural network

•A novel convolutional neural network (CNN) was proposed for agricultural plastic cover mapping.•Both plastic greenhouses and mulching films could be detected using this model.•The proposed model yields a high accuracy (about 90%) both in China and Saudi Arabia.•It is the first attempt to separate plastic greenhouses from mulching films.