ORCID
- Steven Davy: 0000-0002-3300-1152
Abstract
Ireland has a wide variety of farmlands that includes arable fields, grassland, hedgerows, streams, lakes, rivers, and native woodlands. Traditional methods of habitat identification rely on field surveys, which are resource intensive, therefore there is a strong need for digital methods to improve the speed and efficiency of identification and differentiation of farmland habitats. This is challenging because of the large number of subcategories having nearly indistinguishable features within the habitat classes. Heterogeneity among sites within the same habitat class is another problem. Therefore, this research work presents a preliminary technique for accurate farmland classification using stacked ensemble deep convolutional neural networks (DNNs). The proposed approach has been validated on a high-resolution dataset collected using drones. The image samples were manually labelled by the experts in the area before providing them to the DNNs for training purposes. Three pre-trained DNNs customized using the transfer learning approach are used as the base learners. The predicted features derived from the base learners were then used to train a DNN based meta-learner to achieve high classification rates. We analyse the obtained results in terms of convergence rate, confusion matrices, and ROC curves. This is a preliminary work and further research is needed to establish a standard technique.
Keywords
Base-learner, Drone images, Farmland habitat, Habitat classification, Meta-learner, Stacked ensemble model
DOI Link
Publication Date
2022-03-01
Publication Title
Sensors
Volume
22
Issue
6
ISSN
1424-8220
Deposit Date
2026-07-15
Funding
Funding: This research was supported by Science Foundation Ireland and the Department of Agriculture, Food and Marine on behalf of the Government of Ireland VistaMilk research centre under the grant 16/RC/3835. JAF and PM were supported by the SmartAgriHubs project, which received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme under grant agreement No. 818182.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Additional Links
Recommended Citation
Abraham, Lizy; Davy, Steven; Zawish, Muhammad; Mhapsekar, Rahul; Finn, John A.; and Moran, Patrick, "Preliminary Classification of Selected Farmland Habitats in Ireland Using Deep Neural Networks" (2022). Research Outputs: 2025-Present. 5.
https://arrow.tudublin.ie/csdtro/5