Mapping Industrial Poultry Operations at Scale with Deep Learning and Aerial Imagery

Details

Author(s):
  • Daniel E. Ho
  • Ben Chugg
  • Brandon Anderson
  • Juan M. Lavista Ferres
  • Caleb Robinson
Publish Date:
July 18, 2022
Publication Title:
IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Applied Earth Observations and Remote Sensing
Publisher:
IEEE
Format:
Journal Article Page(s) 1-14
Citation(s):
  • Caleb Robinson, Ben Chugg, Brandon Anderson, Juan M. Lavista Ferres & Daniel E. Ho, Mapping Industrial Poultry Operations at Scale with Deep Learning and Aerial Imagery, IEEE J. Sel. Topics in Applied Earth Observs. & Remote Sensing (forthcoming 2022).
Related Organization(s):

Abstract

Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs) pose serious risks to air, water, and public health, but have proven to be challenging to regulate. The U.S. Government Accountability Office notes that a basic challenge is the lack of comprehensive location information on CAFOs. We use the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) National Agricultural Imagery Program (NAIP) 1m/pixel aerial imagery to detect poultry CAFOs across the continental United States. We train convolutional neural network (CNN) models to identify individual poultry barns and apply the best performing model to over 42 TB of imagery to create the first national, open-source dataset of poultry CAFOs. We validate the model predictions against held-out validation set on poultry CAFO facility locations from 10 hand-labeled counties in California and demonstrate that this approach has significant potential to fill gaps in environmental monitoring.