Data Acquisition and Processing for GeoAI Models to Support Sustainable Agricultural Practices

There are growing opportunities to leverage new technologies and data sources to address global problems related to sustainability, climate change, and biodiversity loss. The emerging discipline of GeoAI resulting from the convergence of AI and Geospatial science (Geo-AI) is enabling the possibility to harness the increasingly available open Earth Observation data collected from different constellations of satellites and sensors with high spatial, spectral and temporal resolutions. However, transforming these raw data into high-quality datasets that could be used for training AI and specifically deep learning models are technically challenging. This paper describes the process and results of synthesizing labelled-datasets that could be used for training AI (specifically Convolutional Neural Networks) models for determining agricultural land use pattern to support decisions for sustainable farming. In our opinion, this work is a significant step forward in addressing the paucity of usable datasets for developing scalable GeoAI models for sustainable agriculture

SPATIAL MACHINE LEARNING FOR MONITORING TEA LEAVES AND CROP YIELD ESTIMATION USING SENTINEL-2 IMAGERY, (A Case of Gunung Mas Plantation, Bogor)

Indonesia's tea production and export volume have fluctuated with a downward trend in the last five years, partly due to the increasingly competitive world tea quality. Crop yield estimation is part of the management of tea plucking, affecting tea quality and quantity. The constraint in estimating crop yields requires technology that can make the process more effective and efficient. Remote sensing technology and machine learning have been widely used in precision agriculture. Recently, big data processing, especially remote sensing data, machine learning, and deep learning have been carried out using a cloud computing platform. Therefore, we propose using GeoAI, a combination of Sentinel-2A imagery, machine learning, and Google Collaboratory, to predict ready for plucking tea leaves at optimal plucking time at Gunung Mas Plantation Bogor. We used selected bands of Sentinel-2A and extracted more features (i.e., NDVI) as a training set. Then we utilized the tea blocks boundary and tea plucking data to generate labels using Random Forest (RF) and Support Vector Machine (SVM). The classification results were further used to estimate the production of crop tea yield. The RF classifier is able to achieve overall accuracy at 51% and SVM at 54%. Meanwhile, accuracy at optimally aged tea blocks is able to achieve at 75.62% for RF and 52.88% for SVM. Thus, the SVM classifier is better in terms of overall accuracy. Meanwhile, the RF classifier is superior in predicting ready for plucking tea at optimally aged tea blocks

Using Isolation Forest and Alternative Data Products to Overcome Ground Truth Data Scarcity for Improved Deep Learning-based Agricultural Land Use Classification Models

High-quality labelled datasets represent a cornerstone in the development of deep learning models for land use classification. The high cost of data collection, the inherent errors introduced during data mapping efforts, the lack of local knowledge, and the spatial variability of the data hinder the development of accurate and spatially-transferable deep learning models in the context of agriculture. In this paper, we investigate the use of Isolation Forest (IF), an anomaly detection algorithm, to reduce noise in a large-scale, low-resolution alternative ground truth dataset used to train land use deep learning models. We use a modest-size, high-resolution and high-fidelity manually collected ground-truth dataset to calibrate Isolation Forest parameters and evaluate our approach, highlighting the relatively low cost of the methodology. Our data-centric methodology demonstrates the efficacy of deep learning methods coupled with IF to create mid-resolution land-use models and map products for agriculture using an alternative ground-truth dataset. Moreover, we compare our deep learning approach with a traditional algorithm used in remote sensing and evaluate the spatial transferability of the created models. Finally, we reflect upon the lessons learnt and future work

Exploiting the Temporal Dimension of Remotely Sensed Imagery with Deep Learning Models

The rapid rise of artificial intelligence and the increasing availability of open Earth Observation (EO) data present new opportunities to address important global problems such as the proliferation of agricultural systems which endanger ecological sustainability. Despite the plethora of satellite images describing a given location on earth every year, very few deep learning-based solutions have harnessed the temporal and sequential dynamics of land use to map agricultural practices. This paper compares different approaches to classify agricultural land use exploiting the temporal and spectral dimensions of EO data. The results show greater efficiency of the presented deep learning-based algorithms compared to state-of-the-art approaches when mapping agricultural classes

Using AI to Improve Sustainable Agricultural Practices: A Literature Review and Research Agenda

The world is confronted with the grand challenge of food insecurity amidst growing populations and the climate crisis. Artificial intelligence (AI) deployed in agricultural decision support systems (AgriDSS) raises both hopes and concerns for increasing agricultural productivity in sustainable ways. In this paper, we conduct a scoping review to uncover the roadblocks to the use of AI-supported AgriDSS in sustainable agriculture. Based on the corpus of 121 articles, we find that the effective use of AI-supported AgriDSS is hindered at technical, social, ethical, and ecological levels. Then, drawing on the experiential learning perspective, we propose how conjoint experiential learning (CEL) can enhance sustainable agricultural practices by enhancing both AI and human learning and overcoming roadblocks in using AgriDSS. Based on this conceptual framework, we build a research agenda that suggests blind spots and possible directions for future research