Land use classification using aerial imagery can be complex. Characteristics such as ground sampling distance, resolution, number of bands and the information these bands convey are the keys to its accuracy. Random Forest is the most widely used approach but better and more modern alternatives do exist. In this paper, state-of-the-art methods are evaluated, consisting of semantic segmentation networks such as UNet and DeepLabV3+. In addition, two datasets based on aircraft and satellite imagery are generated as a new state of the art to test land use classification. These datasets, called UOPNOA and UOS2, are publicly available. In this work, the performance of these networks and the two datasets generated are evaluated. This paper demonstrates that ground sampling distance is the most important factor in obtaining good semantic segmentation results, but a suitable number of bands can be as important. This proves that both aircraft and satellite imagery can produce good results, although for different reasons. Finally, cost performance for an inference prototype is evaluated, comparing various Microsoft Azure architectures. The evaluation concludes that using a GPU is unnecessarily costly for deployment. A GPU need only be used for training.

The recognition of livestock activity is essential to be eligible for subsides, to automatically supervise critical activities and to locate stray animals. In recent decades, research has been carried out into animal detection, but this paper also analyzes the detection of other key elements that can be used to verify the presence of livestock activity in a given terrain: manure piles, feeders, silage balls, silage storage areas, and slurry pits. In recent years, the trend is to apply Convolutional Neuronal Networks (CNN) as they offer significantly better results than those obtained by traditional techniques. To implement a livestock activity detection service, the following object detection algorithms have been evaluated: YOLOv2, YOLOv4, YOLOv5, SSD, and Azure Custom Vision. Since YOLOv5 offers the best results, producing a mean average precision (mAP) of 0.94, this detector is selected for the creation of a livestock activity recognition service. In order to deploy the service in the best infrastructure, the performance/cost ratio of various Azure cloud infrastructures are analyzed and compared with a local solution. The result is an efficient and accurate service that can help to identify the presence of livestock activity in a specified terrain.