Identifying Land Patterns from Satellite Imagery in Amazon Rainforest using Deep Learning

The Amazon rainforests have been suffering widespread damage, both via natural and artificial means. Every minute, it is estimated that the world loses forest cover the size of 48 football fields. Deforestation in the Amazon rainforest has led to drastically reduced biodiversity, loss of habitat, climate change, and other biological losses. In this respect, it has become essential to track how the nature of these forests change over time. Image classification using deep learning can help speed up this process by removing the manual task of classifying each image. Here, it is shown how convolutional neural networks can be used to track changes in land patterns in the Amazon rainforests. In this work, a testing accuracy of 96.71% was obtained. This can help governments and other agencies to track changes in land patterns more effectively and accurately.

Somnath Rakshit, Soumyadeep Debnath, Dhiman Mondal · 2018