Land type survey is an important task of land resources survey and the basis of scientific management of land resources. With the increasingly prominent problems of population, resources, and environment, there is an urgent need for a fast and accurate classification method of large-scale land use and land cover based on remote sensing data. Traditional machine learning classification methods based on pixel classification achieved sufficient results and are widely used, such as maximum likelihood classification and random forests method. However, with the development of the novel technology of deep learning, in practical application, for multi-classified land resources, how to use the fast and effective classification method of low and medium resolution RS images needs further research. This paper takes the land resource classification of the Tonghe medium resolution RS dataset of the third land survey in China as an example to screen and compare traditional machine learning classification methods and semantic segmentation models FC-DenseNet56, GCN, BiSeNet, U-Net, DeepLabV3, AdapNet, and PSPNet, which aim to select the optimal feature extraction model. The results show that the classification accuracy of the U-Net model can reach 93.62%, which is more accurate and effective than traditional machine learning methods and other semantic segmentation models. It is suitable for multi-classification tasks of land cover resources in low and medium resolution RS images and shows a superior effect in practical application. Besides, the conclusion of this study can provide a demonstration for large-scale land cover resources investigation using low and medium resolution RS images.INDEX TERMS land use and land cover, semantic segmentation, multi-classification, deep learning, U-Net.