Detection of Fairy Circles in UAV Images Using Deep Learning

Abstract

Fairy circles are circular patches of barren soil forming large clusters in the arid grasslands of Southern Africa (especially in Namibia) and Western Australia. Fairy circles are clearly visible in aerial images shown in applications such as Google Maps, and they can be recorded using sensors mounted on drones in very high image and video resolution for ecological studies aiming at understanding the origin of these patterns. Traditional analysis of fairy circles is done by manual digitising and counting. We also showed recently that, despite being challenging, traditional computer vision methods enabled the detection of fairy circles. To improve fairy circle detection and localization automatically in aerial images, we here present the use of a convolutional neural network (CNN). The results suggest that new methods using CNNs outperform other methods in terms of accuracy.