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In late 2019, the Ministry of Environment in Denmark urgently needed to calculate the total emission of ammonia. The best way of doing this was getting the total number of slurry tanks and information on the coverage of the tanks, as the emission factors are lower for covered tanks than from uncovered tanks. As there are no official statistics on slurry tanks, the ministry applied to SEGES, which is a part of the agricultural advisory service owned by the Danish farmers. However, even with broad knowledge and access to agricultural data, counting the number of slurry tanks located in 34’000 farms spread over a territory of 42,933 km2 was impossible to be done manually in a reasonable time.
SEGES needed a tool that will allow them to automate the country scale detection as much as possible. The method required was a combination of machine learning with existing agricultural GIS-databases. Their choice fell on Picterra, a cloud-based geospatial platform that automates the analysis of satellite and aerial imagery, enabling users to identify objects and patterns (road cracks, damaged roofs, etc.) at scale, anywhere on Earth.
SEGES had two sources of data for this project
Using these two sources, SEGES has worked with Picterra to build a slurry tanks custom detector and to run it over the whole country.
First, SEGES defined a number of training areas and annotated some examples of slurry tanks so that Picterra’s machine learning model could learn to recognize those. Slurry tanks are round-shaped objects with some variety in their appearance (they can be filled or empty and they can have a roof or not). They’re located next to farms, that’s why circles around each farm in Denmark were used as detection areas. A very low amount of annotations was necessary for a country scale detection: only 56 examples of slurry tanks across 48 training areas
The results? Using Picterra, SEGES was able to detect 26.000 slurry tanks over Denmark in a few hours with only 56 training annotations.
Check this link to see an interactive map of slurry tanks in Denmark: http://cloud.picterra.ch/public/showcase/seges/index.html
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