AI-ForestWatch: semantic segmentation based end-to-end framework for forest estimation and change detection using multi-spectral remote sensing imagery

Abstract

Forest change detection is crucial for sustainable forest management. The changes in the forest area due to deforestation (such as wild fires or logging due to development activities) or afforestation alter the total forest area. Additionally, it impacts the available stock for commercial purposes, climate change due to carbon emissions, and biodiversity of the forest habitat estimations, which are essential for disaster management and policy making. In recent years, foresters have relied on hand-crafted features or bi-temporal change detection methods to detect change in the remote sensing imagery to estimate the forest area. Due to manual processing steps, these methods are fragile and prone to errors and can generate inaccurate (i.e., under or over) segmentation results. In contrast to traditional methods, we present AI-ForestWatch, an end to end framework for forest estimation and change analysis. The proposed approach uses deep convolution neural network-based semantic segmentation to process multi-spectral space-borne images to quantitatively monitor the forest cover change patterns by automatically extracting features from the dataset. Our analysis is completely data driven and has been performed using extended (with vegetation indices) Landsat-8 multi-spectral imagery from 2014 to 2020. As a case study, we estimated the forest area in 15 districts of Pakistan and generated forest change maps from 2014 to 2020, where major afforestation activity is carried out during this period. Our critical analysis shows an improvement of forest cover in 14 out of 15 districts. The AI-ForestWatch framework along with the associated dataset will be made public upon publication so that it can be adapted by other countries or regions.