Roscosmos connected artificial intelligence to search for illegal deforestation

2022: Implementation of the Digital Earth service project

Illegal logging in the Arkhangelsk and Irkutsk regions began to be sought using space photography of the Earth and artificial intelligence technologies. The project is being implemented by specialists from the Roscosmos enterprise - TERRA TECH JSC (the company of the Russian Space Systems holding, which is part of the State Corporation) and Roslesinforg FSBI. This was announced by Roscosmos on September 22, 2022. The basis for monitoring the state of forests is provided by the Digital Earth service.

The use of automatic algorithms "Digital Earth" allows you to significantly increase the number of detected logging with their fixation in the shortest possible time. At the same time, not only does the speed of processing forest data increase, but also objects are highlighted that a person may not see or accidentally miss when decrypting space images.

The company jointly monitors four forestries. During the summer season of 2022, 53 shooting cycles were analyzed. Continuous monitoring is carried out in parallel with further training of neural networks, which constantly increases the accuracy of recognition and the quality of the result. Automatic recognition also has some limitations, but it helps employees to check large areas, while increasing their competence in the field of working with artificial intelligence, emphasized the deputy director of the Federal State Budgetary Institution "Roslesinforg," Lyudmila Konovalova.

Artificial intelligence determines regional forest changes by comparing space images over a certain period of time. The resulting analytics are checked and compared with forest management data from the forest department. As a result, violations and inconsistencies in the registers are revealed. Further further training of the artificial intelligence system takes place, after which the cycle is repeated again. Over and over again, the program improves and produces a more accurate result of automatic object segmentation.

"The company provides not only a software product as a service, but also offers access to the platform itself and computing resources. For federal executive bodies, this is a great feature, since it allows you to develop your own competencies without the cost of complex and demanding information resources. All data is stored in one place, which also makes it easier to find and apply it. The results of the experiment show that it makes sense to scale it to the lands of the forest fund of all regions of Russia. This requires a significant increase in computing resources and continued work to improve artificial intelligence algorithms. TERRA TECH managed to achieve 70% growth in process automation, and it is planned to increase this indicator, noted the general director of TERRA TECH , Maxim Boltachev.

The project of continuous monitoring of the forest fund based on satellite survey data is being implemented as part of the execution of the order of the Deputy Prime Minister of the Russian Federation Abramchenko, given by her during a retreat on the use of DZZ technologies in TERRA TECH JSC in February 2022.