1

1. PROBLEM STATEMENT

The world is facing an acute climate crisis, owing to the drastic increase in the industries,
vehicles, incineration and other methods of waste disposal, activity at conventional power
generation plants, oil drilling, consumerism, and most importantly deforestation. Although
much awareness is being spread about the need to reforest our lands, deforestation is still
being carried out both legally and illegally at alarming rates. To protect the world from this
overshadowing catastrophe, it has become all the more necessary to keep tabs on the
deforestation activity being carried out across the world as a primary measure to tackle the
situation. The goal of this project is to track changes in the Amazon rainforest due to
deforestation using satellite image data.

2. AIM

The application to be developed aims to use the available dense quality images of the
Amazon rainforest to detect deforested areas of land, and apply the same model to other
regions of the world.

3. HYPOTHESIS

Several technological innovations have proven extremely beneficial in the efforts to reduce
our carbon footprint and hence preserve and restore our nature. A lesser-explored area of
science that could substantially benefit the cause is the use of satellite imagery to take
pro-climate action. Data captured by satellites could be used as very effective informers to
guide future policies and track the progress of existing ones to sustain life on Earth. Several
remote-sensing satellites have already been put into orbit around the Earth to benefit climate
research and monitor the planet’s resources and be able to predict any unforeseen natural
disasters, but since it would be highly impossible to manually monitor the obtained imagery
constantly, a potential solution would be to automate the process to detect deforested regions
across the Earth.

The model being trained as a part of this project aims to achieve acceptable performance in
detecting deforested areas of land that are being utilised for agriculture, oil and palm farming,
 2

constructions, or simply being left bare in the middle of forests after logging. The model will
be trained on large benchmark datasets, and obtained accuracy results will be displayed on
the user-friendly dashboard designed finally along with the choice to view results for each
sample separately.

However, some of the data available on the Internet, or on the datasets are suspected to be
outdated, and the developed tool is expected to give better accuracy of results once these
corrections have been made. The update required is a challenge of sorts, requiring setting up
communication channels with researchers. Nevertheless, with this improvement, possible
areas to further develop this project would be to improve the performance of the model and
enhance interpretability of the same for users, and to improvise on the front-end application.

4. OBJECTIVES

The project will be evolved with the following objectives:

i. Train a deep learning model on Amazon rainforest images to detect deforested stretches of
land

ii. Use tools of optimisation to improve the performance of the model

iii. Test the resultant model on images from across the world and examine prediction
accuracy

iv. Build a front-end tool that shall enable users to utilise the trained model to detect
deforestation from satellite imagery for other regions of concern globally

5. REVIEW OF LITERATURE

The amount of satellite imagery available that is fit to carry out a thorough analysis and
detect deforested regions is growing every day. Owing to the boost in machine learning
techniques and innovations to improve the processing capabilities of computers, a
considerable amount of research has been conducted on this issue, but each has restricted
itself to specific regions of the world, or limited causes of deforestation. This project attempts
 3

to cover all feasible causes and apply the trained model to any given stretch of land in the
world.

The following are some of the prominent papers from which ideas and implementation
possibilities have been derived for the purposes of this project.

1. Thiago Nunes Kehl, Viviane Todt, Mauricio Roberto Veronez and Silvio César Cazella, in
their paper titled “Amazon Rainforest Deforestation Daily Detection Tool Using Artificial
Neural Networks and Satellite Images”[1] proposed the development of a tool to detect daily
deforestation in the Amazon rainforest, using satellite images from the MODIS/TERRA
sensor and Artificial Neural Networks.

2. Carlos Eduardo Pacheco, María Inmaculada Aguado and Danilo Mollicone, in their paper
“Identification and characterization of deforestation hot spots in Venezuela using MODIS
satellite images”[2] suggested the creation of a map of deforestation hotspots using digital
techniques with an efficiency of 92.5% and permitted the reasons for deforestation in the
identified regions to be clearly distinguished and pointed out.
 4

3. Danang Surya Candra, in the paper “Deforestation detection using multitemporal satellite
images”[3] gives a robust method for deforestation detection called Multitemporal
Deforestation Detection (MDD). It utilizes the difference of reflectance values on the target
image and the original images. MDD can detect deforestation from forest to heterogeneous
land covers such as open land, land clearing for plantation, urban, road and small road, and
burnt area accurately, without interfering with cloud and cloud shadow on the original image.

4. Authors Seong-Hyeok Lee, Kuk-Jin Han, Kwon Lee, Kwang-Jae Lee, Kwan-Young Oh
and Moung-Jin Lee in the paper titled “Classification of Landscape Affected by Deforestation
Using High-Resolution Remote Sensing Data and Deep-Learning Techniques”[4] have
proposed SegNet and U-Net algorithms to be used for applications with high-resolution
remote sensing data obtained by the Kompsat-3 satellite is suggested. From the results, the
U-Net algorithm performed very well at the forest/non-forest area classification level, with
98.4% accuracy for forest areas and 88.5% for non-forest areas.

5. Julius Akinyemi, Josiane Mothe and Nathalie Neptune, in the paper “Deforestation
detection on satellite imagery with deep learning”[5] prescribe a model for detecting
deforestation using deep learning, with a U-net type architecture on fused optical and radar
images are prescribed. The challenges involved are diverse such as coping with the volume,
the variety, the multi-dimensionality and the noise of the data.

6. Authors Indersheel Kaur, H. S. Nanare, Dinesh B. Bhoyar and Sanjay V. Balamwar in their
paper “Remote Sensing Satellite Image Analysis for Deforestation”[6] suggest suitable
 5

remote sensing techniques which can be used for the analyses of planet scope 3m resolution
satellite data of Yavatmal district of Maharashtra state, with the GIS are used to detect the
changes in forest cover. The NDVI values reveal the change of forest cover and various other
categories resulting in an increase and decrease of categories.

where NIR - Near Infra Red regions, Red - Infrared Regions. The computation is done for
each pixel separately.

6. METHODOLOGY

Deep-learning algorithms are currently being used in various remote sensing and spatial
information studies. Precise data is needed to apply deep learning to high-resolution satellite
images, to ensure accurate classification of regional attributes. Thus, learning and testing
datasets are constructed after satellite image preprocessing.

In order to train a model that can detect deforestation from space, we need some labelled
data, consisting of satellite images and labels that should be related to the presence or absence
of deforestation. Three datasets have been chosen:
i. the Amazon dataset, which is a multilabel dataset to track the human footprint in the
Amazon rainforest, containing samples from all over the Amazon rainforest, collected
between January 2016 and February 2017,
ii. the oil palm dataset, which is a binary dataset for oil palm plantation detection. The
dataset has significant differences from the Amazon dataset, mainly in the sense that it has a
narrower focus, with a single label for detecting oil palm plantations, and it’s in a different
part of the world, with all images coming from the Southeast Asian island of Borneo, and
iii. the coffee dataset, which is another binary dataset for detecting coffee plantations in the
Amazon rainforest.
Exploratory data analysis (EDA) is done to analyze and investigate data sets and summarize
their main characteristics, often employing data visualization methods.

This project utilises the Amazon dataset for the purposes of training the model, and the oil
palm dataset is treated as an additional test set, with out-of-domain data. All the images on
 6

these datasets are from satellite imagery, with a 3-meter spatial resolution. The images are
taken in the RGB format given its simplicity and flexibility in handling other images, both
from other datasets and from users. The captured RGB image is first converted to grayscale
and then to a binary image since the image in its binary format enables easier manipulations.
All the images are of the fixed size - 256 x 256.

The performance metric that is commonly used on deep learning applications such as the one
in question is the F2 score. Hence, the same is used on the Amazon dataset to evaluate the
performance of the trained model. For the model to score well, the main criterion is for it to
have few false negatives, so the F2 score gives higher weight to recall. Recall calculates the
percentage of correct predictions for the positive class out of all positive predictions that
could be made. Precision refers to the percentage of the true positives to the total number of
positive predictions. The F2 score is thus calculated as:

Where the value of beta is 2, precision ‘p’ and recall ‘r’ are computed as follows:
 7

Weights are adjusted in the neural network by calculating the loss. Commonly, this is done by
a function which actually calculates the loss of each training step by comparing the distance
between the prediction and the label:

where N is the batch size, ygt is the ground truth label and ypred predicted label.

To improve the model, FastAI and ​ResNet50 models could be used to train the model,
anticipating better results in comparison to the TensorFlow approach. Most of the modelling
steps are handled by FastAI, which makes the code short and the development process fast.
At the end of the model development, Streamlit is to be used to interpret the deep learning
model to show predictions on the dataset and the model results.
 8

REFERENCES

[1] Amazon Rainforest Deforestation Daily Detection Tool Using Artificial Neural Networks
and Satellite Images - Thiago Nunes Kehl, Viviane Todt, Mauricio Roberto Veronez and
Silvio César Cazella
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/4/10/2566/htm

[2] Identification and characterization of deforestation hot spots in Venezuela using MODIS
satellite images - Carlos Eduardo Pacheco, María Inmaculada Aguado and Danilo Mollicone
https://www.scielo.br/j/aa/a/FCTFG3STwYp9jjKkd3YHmxf/abstract/?lang=en&format=html

[3] Deforestation detection using multitemporal satellite images - Danang Surya Candra
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/342692202_Deforestation_detection_using_multite
mporal_satellite_images

[4] Classification of Landscape Affected by Deforestation Using High-Resolution Remote

Sensing Data and Deep-Learning Techniques - Seong-Hyeok Lee, Kuk-Jin Han, Kwon Lee
Kwang-Jae Lee, Kwan-Young Oh and Moung-Jin Lee
https://www.mdpi.com/2072-4292/12/20/3372/htm

[5] Deforestation detection on satellite imagery with deep learning - Julius Akinyemi, Josiane
Mothe, Nathalie Neptune
https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-03044231

[6] Remote Sensing Satellite Image Analysis for Deforestation in Yavatmal District,
Maharashtra, India
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/9451744