Automated Delineation of Smallholder Farm Fields Using Fully Convolutional Networks and Generative Adversarial Networks

Accurate boundaries of smallholder farm fields are important and indispensable geo-information that benefits farmers,managers,and policymakers in terms of better managing and utilizing their agricultural resources.Due to their small size,irregular shape,and the use of mixed-cropping techniques,the farm fields of smallholder can be difficult to delineate automatically.In recent years,numerous studies on field contour extraction using a deep Convolutional Neural Network(CNN)have been proposed.However,there is a relative shortage of labeled data for filed boundaries,thus affecting the training effect of CNN.Traditional methods mostly use image flipping,and random rotation for data augmentation.In this paper,we propose to apply Generative Adversarial Network(GAN)for the data augmentation of farm fields label to increase the diversity of samples.Specifically,we propose an automated method featured by Fully Convolutional Neural networks(FCN)in combination with GAN to improve the delineation accuracy of smallholder farms from Very High Resolution(VHR)images.We first investigate four State-Of-The-Art(SOTA)FCN architectures,i.e.,U-Net,PSPNet,SegNet and OCRNet,to find the optimal architecture in the contour detection task of smallholder farm fields.Second,we apply the identified optimal FCN architecture in combination with Contour GAN and pixel2pixel GAN to improve the accuracy of contour detection.We test our method on the study area in the Sudano-Sahelian savanna region of northern Nigeria.The best combination achieved F1 scores of 0.686 on Test Set 1(TS1),0.684 on Test Set 2(TS2),and 0.691 on Test Set 3(TS3).Results indicate that our architecture adapts to a variety of advanced networks and proves its effectiveness in this task.The conceptual,theoretical,and experimental knowledge from this study is expected to seed many GAN-based farm delineation methods in the future.

Height estimation from single aerial imagery using contrastive learning based multi-scale refinement network

Height map estimation from a single aerial image plays a crucial role in localization,mapping,and 3D object detection.Deep convolutional neural networks have been used to predict height information from single-view remote sensing images,but these methods rely on large volumes of training data and often overlook geometric features present in orthographic images.To address these issues,this study proposes a gradient-based self-supervised learning network with momentum contrastive loss to extract geometric information from non-labeled images in the pretraining stage.Additionally,novel local implicit constraint layers are used at multiple decoding stages in the proposed supervised network to refine high-resolution features in height estimation.The structural-aware loss is also applied to improve the robustness of the network to positional shift and minor structural changes along the boundary area.Experimental evaluation on the ISPRS benchmark datasets shows that the proposed method outperforms other baseline networks,with minimum MAE and RMSE of 0.116 and 0.289 for the Vaihingen dataset and 0.077 and 0.481 for the Potsdam dataset,respectively.The proposed method also shows around threefold data efficiency improvements on the Potsdam dataset and domain generalization on the Enschede datasets.These results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method in height map estimation from single-view remote sensing images.