Comparison of Optical and SAR Data for Deforestation Mapping in the Amazon Rainforest with Fully Convolutional Networks

Early detection of deforestation processes is vital to maintain and regulate tropical rainforests, such as in the Amazon region. Most of them rely on optical imagery. Approaches based on Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) data are comparatively unexplored, in particular for deforestation detection in tropical rainforests. This work addresses this gap and evaluates Fully Convolutional Networks based on the U-Net, Res-Unet and Siamese Network, for deforestation detection using images from three different sensors, Landsat-8, Sentinel-2, and Sentinel-1. Experiments conducted on a dataset of the Amazon rainforest indicated that Fully Convolutional Networks working on Sentinel-1 data can achieve sufficient accuracy for detecting deforestation in tropical rainforests when clouds prevent the use of optical data11The source code is available in https://github.zcom/MabelOrtega/Comparison-of-Optical-and-SAR-data-for-deforestation-mapping-in-the-Amazon-Forest-with-FCN.