Revealing influencing factors on global waste distribution via deep-learning based dumpsite detection from satellite imagery.
other
Where this comes from
- Record sourced from PubMed, PMID 36922495.
- Also identified by DOI 10.1038/s41467-023-37136-1 and PMC identifier 10015540.
- Licence recorded as CC BY.
- The licence permits redistribution, so the abstract is shown in full and the full text is available from the publisher.
Abstract
With the advancement of global civilisation, monitoring and managing dumpsites have become essential parts of environmental governance in various countries. Dumpsite locations are difficult to obtain in a timely manner by local government agencies and environmental groups. The World Bank shows that governments need to spend massive labour and economic costs to collect illegal dumpsites to implement management. Here we show that applying novel deep convolutional networks to high-resolution satellite images can provide an effective, efficient, and low-cost method to detect dumpsites. In sampled areas of 28 cities around the world, our model detects nearly 1000 dumpsites that appeared around 2021. This approach reduces the investigation time by more than 96.8% compared with the manual method. With this novel and powerful methodology, it is now capable of analysing the relationship between dumpsites and various social attributes on a global scale, temporally and spatially.