DEFORESTATION DETECTION IN THE AMAZON RAINFOREST WITH SPATIAL AND CHANNEL ATTENTION MECHANISMS

Abstract. Deforestation in the Amazon rainforest is an alarming problem of global interest. Environmental impacts of this process are countless, but probably the most significant concerns regard the increase in CO₂ emissions and global temperature rise. Currently, the assessment of deforested areas in the Amazon region is a manual task, where people analyse multiple satellite images to quantify the deforestation. We propose a method for automatic deforestation detection based on Deep Learning Neural Networks with dual-attention mechanisms. We employed a siamese architecture to detect deforestation changes between optical images in 2018 and 2019. Experiments were performed to evaluate the relevance and sensitivity of hyperparameter tuning of the loss function and the effects of dual-attention mechanisms (spatial and channel) in predicting deforestation. Experimental results suggest that a proper tuning of the loss function might bring benefits in terms of generalisation. We also show that the spatial attention mechanism is more relevant for deforestation detection than the channel attention mechanism. When both mechanisms are combined, the greatest improvements are found, and we reported an increase of 1.06% in the mean average precision over a baseline.