Deep learning for Amazon satellite image analysis
Abstract
Machine learning can be the key to saving the world from losing football field-sized forest areas each second. As deforestation in the Amazon basin causes devastating effects both on the ecosystem and the environment, there is urgent need to better understand and manage its changing landscape. A competition was recently conducted to develop algorithms to analyze satellite images of the Amazon. Successful algorithms will be able to detect subtle features in different image scenes, giving us the crucial data needed to be able to manage deforestation and its consequences more effectively. This paper presents our entry to the competition, the results obtained, and possible improvements to the algorithm.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Claims the paper makes
Claims other papers make about this one
Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?
Manual, on-the-ground observation can be accelerated by annotation of remote sensing data.
“This has traditionally been done via manual, on-the-ground observation, but the process can be accelerated by annotation of remote sensing data [91,92,513,637] (see also Section 6.1).”
From Tackling climate change with machine learning (2023) · cites this paper as [92]
Cites
Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization
Kingma, D. P., & Ba, J. (2014) · arXiv · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1412.6980 · Cited by 98,946 · see citing works
Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition
Simonyan, K., & Zisserman, A. (2014) · arXiv · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1409.1556 · Cited by 74,248 · see citing works
ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge
Russakovsky, O., Deng, J., Su, H., Krause, J., Satheesh, S., Ma, S., Huang, Z., Karpathy, A., Khosla, A., Bernstein, M., et al. (2015) · International Journal of Computer Vision · doi:10.1007/s11263-015-0816-y · Cited by 39,380 · see citing works
Rethinking the Inception Architecture for Computer Vision
Szegedy, C., Vanhoucke, V., Ioffe, S., Shlens, J., & Wojna, Z. (2016) · 2016 IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) · doi:10.1109/cvpr.2016.308 · Cited by 32,138 · see citing works
Batch Normalization: Accelerating Deep Network Training by Reducing Internal Covariate Shift
Ioffe, S., & Szegedy, C. (2015) · arXiv · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1502.03167 · Cited by 27,818 · see citing works
Xception: Deep Learning with Depthwise Separable Convolutions
Chollet, F. (2017) · 2017 IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) · doi:10.1109/cvpr.2017.195 · Cited by 20,380 · see citing works
Learning multi-label scene classification
Boutell, M. R., Luo, J., Shen, X., & Brown, C. M. (2004) · Pattern Recognition · doi:10.1016/j.patcog.2004.03.009 · Cited by 2,356 · see citing works
Beyond Accuracy, F-Score and ROC: A Family of Discriminant Measures for Performance Evaluation
Sokolova, M., Japkowicz, N., & Szpakowicz, S. (2006) · Lecture Notes in Computer Science · doi:10.1007/11941439_114 · Cited by 1,974 · see citing works
DenseNet: Implementing Efficient ConvNet Descriptor PyramidsPreprint
Iandola, F., Moskewicz, M. W., Karayev, S., Girshick, R., Darrell, T., & Keutzer, K. (2014) · arXiv (Cornell University) · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1404.1869 · Cited by 909 · see citing works
DATA AUGMENTATION AND DYNAMIC LINEAR MODELS
Frühwirth‐Schnatter, S. (1994) · Journal of Time Series Analysis · doi:10.1111/j.1467-9892.1994.tb00184.x · Cited by 808 · see citing works
Xception: Deep Learning with Depthwise Separable Convolutions
Chollet, F. (2016) · arXiv · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1610.02357 · Cited by 538 · see citing works
Object Detection Networks on Convolutional Feature Maps
Ren, S., He, K., Girshick, R., Zhang, X., & Sun, J. (2017) · IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence · doi:10.1109/tpami.2016.2601099 · Cited by 454 · see citing works
A weighted voting framework for classifiers ensembles
Kuncheva, L. I., & Rodríguez, J. J. (2012) · Knowledge and Information Systems · doi:10.1007/s10115-012-0586-6 · Cited by 258 · see citing works
Autonomous ships on the high seas
Levander, O. (2017) · IEEE Spectrum · doi:10.1109/mspec.2017.7833502 · Cited by 108 · see citing works
Sensitivity of Barnes Ice Cap, Baffin Island, Canada, to climate state and internal dynamics
Gilbert, A., Flowers, G. E., Miller, G. H., Rabus, B., Wychen, W. V., Gardner, A., & Copland, L. (2016) · Journal of Geophysical Research Earth Surface · doi:10.1002/2016jf003839 · Cited by 34 · see citing works
Satellite alerts track deforestation in real time
Popkin, G. (2016) · Nature · doi:10.1038/530392a · Cited by 21 · see citing works
SAR and InSAR for flood monitoring: Examples with COSMO/SkyMed data
Refice, A., Capolongo, D., Lepera, A., Pasquariello, G., Pietranera, L., Volpec, F., D’Addabbo, A., & Bovenga, F. (2013) · IEEE International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium (IGARSS) · doi:10.1109/igarss.2013.6721254 · Cited by 13 · see citing works
Remote Sensing of Natural Disasters [Scanning the Issue]
Chen, K., Serpico, S. B., & Smith, J. A. (2012) · Proceedings of the IEEE · doi:10.1109/jproc.2012.2205835 · Cited by 8 · see citing works
Monitoring Rainforest Dynamics in the Amazon with MODIS Land Products
HUETE, A. R., Running, S. W., & Myneni, R. B. (2006) · doi:10.1109/igarss.2006.72 · Cited by 7 · see citing works
Remote Sensing of Natural Disasters
Chien, S., & Tanpipat, V. (2012) · Springer eBooks · doi:10.1007/978-1-4614-5684-1_17 · Cited by 6 · see citing works
Residual Network with Delayed Max Pooling for Very Large Scale Plant Identification.
Hang, S. T., & Aono, M. (2017) · CLEF (Working Notes) · Cited by 4 · see citing works
Using satellites to predict earthquakes, volcano eruptions, identify and track tsunamis from space
Losik, L. (2012) · Proceedings - IEEE Aerospace Conference · doi:10.1109/aero.2012.6187030 · Cited by 2 · see citing works
Flagged first, then by citations
1 of the 23 references couldn’t be matched to a known paper.
Cited by
Sorted by citations
Tackling climate change with machine learning
Rolnick, D., Donti, P. L., Kaack, L. H., Kochanski, K., Lacoste, A., Sankaran, K., Ross, A. S., Milojevic-Dupont, N., Jaques, N., Waldman-Brown, A., et al. (2023) · ACM Computing Surveys · doi:10.1145/3485128 · Cited by 336 · see citing works
Persello, C., Wegner, J. D., Hänsch, R., Tuia, D., Ghamisi, P., Koeva, M., & Camps‐Valls, G. (2022) · IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Magazine · doi:10.1109/mgrs.2021.3136100 · Cited by 197 · see citing works
Fire Detection Method in Smart City Environments Using a Deep-Learning-Based Approach
Avazov, K., Mukhiddinov, M., Makhmudov, F., & Cho, Y. I. (2021) · Electronics · doi:10.3390/electronics11010073 · Cited by 142 · see citing works
Wildfire Segmentation Using Deep Vision Transformers
Ghali, R., Akhloufi, M. A., Jmal, M., Mseddi, W. S., & Attia, R. (2021) · Remote Sensing · doi:10.3390/rs13173527 · Cited by 91 · see citing works
Lee, S.-H., Han, K., Lee, K., Lee, K., Oh, K.-Y., & Lee, M.-J. (2020) · Remote Sensing · doi:10.3390/rs12203372 · Cited by 87 · see citing works
Unnikrishnan, A., Sowmya, V., & Soman, K. P. (2019) · Multimedia Tools and Applications · doi:10.1007/s11042-019-7179-2 · Cited by 48 · see citing works
RetractedSecurity Approaches in Machine Learning for Satellite Communication
Rath, M., & Mishra, S. (2019) · Studies in computational intelligence · doi:10.1007/978-3-030-20212-5_10 · Cited by 43 · see citing works
Deep AlexNet with Reduced Number of Trainable Parameters for Satellite Image Classification
Unnikrishnan, A., Sowmya, V., & Soman, K. P. (2018) · Procedia Computer Science · doi:10.1016/j.procs.2018.10.342 · Cited by 37 · see citing works
Learning CNN Filters From User-Drawn Image Markers for Coconut-Tree Image Classification
de Souza, I. E., & Falcão, A. X. (2020) · IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Letters · doi:10.1109/lgrs.2020.3020098 · Cited by 31 · see citing works
Forest Cover Change Detection Using Satellite Images
Kalwar, A., Mathur, R., Chavan, S., & Narvekar, C. (2021) · Lecture notes on data engineering and communications technologies · doi:10.1007/978-981-16-3961-6_46 · Cited by 6 · see citing works
Arevalo, J. D. C., Calica, P. C., Celestino, B. A. D. R., Dimapunong, K. A., Lopez, D. J. D., & Austria, Y. D. (2020) · IEEE International Conference on System Engineering and Technology (ICSET) · doi:10.1109/icset51301.2020.9265375 · Cited by 5 · see citing works
Deep Learning on High Spatial and Temporal Cadence Satellite Imagery for Field Boundary Delineation
Shah, S. R. A., Rehman, O. U., Ishaq, R. A. F., Shabbir, Y., & Ahmad, I. (2021) · International Conference on Aerospace Science and Engineering (ICASE) · doi:10.1109/icase54940.2021.9904133 · Cited by 3 · see citing works
Classification of Low-Resolution Satellite Images Using Fractal Augmented Descriptors
Padhy, R., Swain, S. S., Dash, S. K., & Mishra, J. (2021) · International Journal of Image and Graphics · doi:10.1142/s0219467822500024 · Cited by 3 · see citing works
Remote Monitoring Systems for Conservation of the Amazon Rainforest: A Systematic Review
Cepeda, J. A. T., Ospina-Mendivelso, N., Díaz-Palacios, V. M., Nava, D. P. C., Triana, A., Cano, C. C., Corredor, D. A., & Varón, M. (2025) · Mundo Amazónico · doi:10.15446/ma.v16n1.114004 · Cited by 1 · see citing works
Landform Segmentation in Terrain Images Using Image Translation Neural Network Architectures
Bajaj, A., Bhardwaj, A., Tuteja, Y., & Abraham, A. (2024) · Lecture notes in networks and systems · doi:10.1007/978-3-031-64850-2_47 · Cited by 1 · see citing works
- Authors
- Bragilevsky, L., & Bajic, I. V.
- Affiliations
- Simon Fraser University (CA)
- ORCID
- Bragilevsky, Lior
- Venue
- 2017 IEEE Pacific Rim Conference on Communications, Computers and Signal Processing (PACRIM)
- Publisher
- IEEE
- Published
- 2017-08
- Pages
- 1-5
- OpenAlex
- W2773356293
- Cited by
- 17
- References
- 23
- Citations by year
- 2025: 1 · 2024: 1 · 2022: 3 · 2021: 5 · 2020: 4 · 2019: 2 · 2018: 1
- FWCI
- 2.68
- Type
- conference paper
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- IEEE Pacific Rim Conference on Communications, Computers and Signal Processing (PACRIM) (publishedVersion)
- Topics
- Physical Sciences › Engineering › Media Technology › Remote-Sensing Image Classification
- Physical Sciences › Environmental Science › Ecology › Remote Sensing in Agriculture
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition › Advanced Neural Network Applications
- Keywords
- deforestation detection, Amazon rainforest, satellite imagery, deep learning, image classification, forest loss, landscape change monitoring
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review