Land Boundary Delineation

Using U-net
AMLD Africa 2022: 3rd - 5thNovember , 2022

Theophilus Aidoo
Ishango.ai is a social enterprise that creates data science jobs in Africa.

It connects talents in Africa to global host companies to work on real-life

data science projects.

As a company, it has the mission to create high-skill data science jobs

across Africa.
Outline
1. Background
2. Objectives
3. Methodology
4. Sample Input Data
5. Architecture of U-net
6. Preliminary Results
7. Impact
8. Conclusion
9. Future Works
Background

As cities and towns develop, demand for land for various purposes such
as agriculture, building of homes, and industrialisation increases.

Leveraging on deep learning algorithms, land allocation and monitoring

of land use can become a very handy task.

In this project we are used U-net, a type Convolutional Neural Networks

to learn land boundaries from satellite images.
Background
Objectives
● To develop a working model that can accurately find the boundaries
of parcels of land from satellite images.

● To apply the model in other areas such as agriculture and land

registry.
Methodology
● Download satellite data (Images download period : 2017)
● Combine bands to form input RGB images
● Normalise mask layout of land and use as target
● Using U-Net;
○ Encoder : resnet34 and Encoder-weight: imagenet
○ Segment land boundaries from land
Sample Input Data

Satellite Image Full Mask Boundary Mask

Architecture of U-net

Image credit:
U-Net, A Convolutional Neural Networks for Biomedical Image
Segmentation
Preliminary Results
Jaccard similarity score of 0.87
Recall

Class 0.85
0

Class 0.83
1
Impact
● Enhance land acquisition process.

● Improve land allocation for sustainable use.

● Land use monitoring.

Conclusion
Land boundary delineation as a segmentation problem can be efficiently
resolved using U-net.
Future Works
● Further exploration can be done using other pre-trained models as
encoder.
● Model could be trained on current dataset to learn new boundaries.
Limitation
● Long computation time during model training, GPUs are preferred

for this project.

● Downloaded image data requires high storage size.

References
● Ronneberger, Olaf, Philipp Fischer, and Thomas Brox. "U-net: Convolutional
networks for biomedical image segmentation." International Conference on
Medical image computing and computer-assisted intervention. Springer,
Cham, 2015.
● Kumar, Sandeep, and Prabhu Jayagopal. "Delineation of field boundary from
multispectral satellite images through U-Net segmentation and template
matching." Ecological Informatics 64 (2021): 101370.
● https://smp.readthedocs.io/en/latest/quickstart.html
THANK YOU
Let’s Connect

LinkedIn :
https://www.linkedin.com/in/theophilus-aidoo-b31319158/

Email: theophilus@ishango.ai , theoaid51@gmail.com