The availability of remote-sensing multisource data from optical-based satellite sensors has created new opportunities and challenges for forest monitoring in the Amazon Biome. In particular, change-detection analysis has emerged in recent decades to monitor forest-change dynamics, supporting some Brazilian governmental initiatives such as PRODES and DETER projects for biodiversity preservation in threatened areas. In recent years fully convolutional network architectures have witnessed numerous proposals adapted for the change-detection task. This paper comprehensively explores state-of-the-art fully convolutional networks such as U-Net, ResU-Net, SegNet, FC-DenseNet, and two DeepLabv3+ variants on monitoring deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon. The networks’ performance is evaluated experimentally in terms of Precision, Recall, $F1$-score, and computational load using satellite images with different spatial and spectral resolution: Landsat-8 and Sentinel-2. We also include the results of an unprecedented auditing process performed by senior specialists to visually evaluate each deforestation polygon derived from the network with the highest accuracy results for both satellites. This assessment allowed estimation of the accuracy of these networks simulating a process “in nature” and faithful to the PRODES methodology. We conclude that the high resolution of Sentinel-2 images improves the segmentation of deforestation polygons both quantitatively (in terms of $F1$-score) and qualitatively. Moreover, the study also points to the potential of the operational use of Deep Learning (DL) mapping as products to be consumed in PRODES.

Conditional (cGAN)-based methods proposed so far for synthetic aperture radar (SAR)-to-optical image synthesis tend to produce noisy and unsharp optical outcomes. In this work, we propose the atrous-cGAN, a novel cGAN architecture that improves the SAR-to-optical image translation. The proposed generator and discriminator networks rely on atrous convolutions and incorporate an atrous spatial pyramid pooling (ASPP) module to enhance fine details in the generated optical image by exploiting spatial context at multiple scales. This letter reports experiments carried out to assess the performance of atrous-cGAN for the synthesis of Landsat-8 images from Sentinel-1A data based on three public data sets. The experimental analysis indicated that the atrous-cGAN consistently outperformed the classical pix2pix counterpart in terms of visual quality, similar to the true optical image, and as a feature learning tool for semantic segmentation.

Many deep-learning (DL)-based, domain adaptation (DA) methods for remote sensing (RS) applications rely on adversarial training strategies to align features extracted from images of different domains in a shared latent space. However, the performance of such representation matching techniques is negatively impacted when class occurrences in the target domain, for which no labeled data are available during training, are highly imbalanced. In this work, we propose a DL-based representation matching approach for DA in the context of change detection tasks. We further evaluate the approach in a deforestation mapping application, characterized by a high-class imbalance between the deforestation and no-deforestation classes. The domains represent different sites in the Amazon and Brazilian Cerrado biomes. To mitigate the class imbalance problem, we devised an unsupervised pseudolabeling scheme based on change vector analysis (CVA) that prevents the feature alignment to be biased toward the overrepresented class. The experimental results indicate that the proposed approach can improve the accuracy of cross-domain deforestation detection.

Deforestation is a wide-reaching problem, responsible for serious environmental issues, such as biodiversity loss and global climate change. Containing approximately ten percent of all biomass on the planet and home to one tenth of the known species, the Amazon biome has faced important deforestation pressure in the last decades. Devising efficient deforestation detection methods is, therefore, key to combat illegal deforestation and to aid in the conception of public policies directed to promote sustainable development in the Amazon. In this work, we implement and evaluate a deforestation detection approach which is based on a Fully Convolutional, Deep Learning (DL) model: the DeepLabv3+. We compare the results obtained with the devised approach to those obtained with previously proposed DL-based methods (Early Fusion and Siamese Convolutional Network) using Landsat OLI-8 images acquired at different dates, covering a region of the Amazon forest. In order to evaluate the sensitivity of the methods to the amount of training data, we also evaluate them using varying training sample set sizes. The results show that all tested variants of the proposed method significantly outperform the other DL-based methods in terms of overall accuracy and F1-score. The gains in performance were even more substantial when limited amounts of samples were used in training the evaluated methods.

Domain adaptation has proven to be suitable for alleviating domain discrepancies, which hinder the generalization capacity of classifiers. Among a few alternatives, domain adaptation techniques that align features in a domain-agnostic space through adversarial learning have been widely investigated. Nevertheless, such an approach often implies the deterioration of feature discriminability as a side effect of the adversarial alignment, which does not take into consideration class labels of the target domain samples. We advocate that weakly-supervised learning can help mitigate that problem, as noisy labels for the target domain samples may serve to sustain class discriminability during the feature alignment procedure. Therefore, in this work we propose a weakly-supervised, adversarial domain adaptation method for a change detection task based on the Domain Adversarial Neural Network (DANN) strategy. We assessed the performance of the proposed method on a deforestation detection application, conducting experiments in sites of the Amazon and Cerrado (Brazilian Savannah) biomes using Landsat-8 images, each site corresponding to a different domain. The results showed that the inclusion of weak supervision in the domain adaptation procedure provided higher accuracies as compared to the original DANN strategy, which did not prescribe any supervision for the selection of target domain samples in the training procedure. On average, the Average Precision and F1-score metrics values increased by 10.1 use of the proposed method. Additionally, our method achieved performances that are compatible with the ones obtained with previously proposed, state-of-the-art domain adaptation methods. To the best of our knowledge, the proposed method is the first weakly-supervised domain adaptation strategy conceived for deforestation detection and, in general, for change detection.