Detection of Plastic Greenhouses Using High Resolution Rgb Remote Sensing Data and Convolutional Neural Network

Abstract

Abstract Agricultural production in greenhouses shows a rapid growth in many parts of the world. This form of intensive farming requires a large amount of water and fertilizers, and can have a severe impact on the environment. The number of greenhouses and their location is important for applications like spatial planning, environmental protection, agricultural statistics and taxation. Therefore, with this study we aim to develop a methodology to detect plastic greenhouses in remote sensing data using machine learning algorithms. This research presents the results of the use of a convolutional neural network for automatic object detection of plastic greenhouses in high resolution remotely sensed data within a GIS environment with a graphical interface to advanced algorithms. The convolutional neural network is trained with manually digitized greenhouses and RGB images downloaded from Google Earth. The ArcGIS Pro geographic information system provides access to many of the most advanced python-based machine learning environments like Keras – TensorFlow, PyTorch, fastai and Scikit-learn. These libraries can be accessed via a graphical interface within the GIS environment. Our research evaluated the results of training and inference of three different convolutional neural networks. Experiments were executed with many settings for the backbone models and hyperparameters. The performance of the three models in terms of detection accuracy and time required for training was compared. The model based on the VGG_11 backbone model (with dropout) resulted in an average accuracy of 79.2% with a relatively short training time of 90 minutes, the much more complex DenseNet121 model was trained in 16.5 hours and showed a result of 79.1%, while the ResNet18 based model showed an average accuracy of 83.1% with a training time of 3.5 hours.