Mapping Sub-Saharan African Agriculture in High-Resolution Satellite Imagery with Computer Vision & Machine Learning (2017)

Advisor: Caylor, Kelly K.

Smallholder farms dominate in many parts of the world, including Sub-Saharan Africa. These systems are characterized by small, heterogeneous, and often indistinct field patterns, requiring a specialized methodology to map agricultural landcover. In this thesis, they developed a benchmark labeled data set of high-resolution satellite imagery of agricultural fields in South Africa. They presented a new approach to mapping agricultural fields, based on efficient extraction of a vast set of simple, highly correlated, and interdependent features, followed by a random forest classifier. The algorithm achieved similar high performance across agricultural types, including spectrally indistinct smallholder fields, and demonstrated the ability to generalize across large geographic areas. In sensitivity analyses, they determined multi-temporal images provided greater performance gains than the addition of multi-spectral bands.

They also demonstrated how active learning can be incorporated in the algorithm to create smaller, more efficient training data sets, which reduced computational resources, minimized the need for humans to hand-label data, and boosted performance. They designed a patch-based uncertainty metric to drive the active learning framework, based on the regular grid of a crowdsourcing platform, and demonstrated how subject matter experts can be replaced with fleets of crowdsourcing workers. Their active learning algorithm achieved similar performance as an algorithm trained with randomly selected data, but with 62% less data samples.

This thesis furthers the goal of providing accurate agricultural landcover maps, at a scale that is relevant for the dominant smallholder class. Accurate maps are crucial for monitoring and promoting agricultural production. Furthermore, improved agricultural landcover maps will aid a host of other applications, including landcover change assessments, cadastral surveys to strengthen smallholder land rights, and constraints for crop modeling and famine prediction.