Transformers for mapping burned areas in Brazilian Pantanal and Amazon with PlanetScope imagery

Pantanal is the largest continuous wetland in the world, but its biodiversity is currently endangered by catastrophic wildfires that occurred in the last three years. The information available for the area only refers to the location and the extent of the burned areas based on medium and low-spatial resolution imagery, ranging from 30 m up to 1 km. However, to improve measurements and assist in environmental actions, robust methods are required to provide a detailed mapping on a higher-spatial scale of the burned areas, such as PlanetScope imagery with 3–5 m spatial resolution. As state-of-the-art, Deep Learning (DL) segmentation methods, in specific Transformed-based networks, are one of the best emerging approaches to extract information from remote sensing imagery. Here we combine Transformers DL methods and high-resolution planet imagery to map burned areas in the Brazilian Pantanal wetland. We first compared the performances of multiple DL-based networks, namely Segformer and DTP Transformers methods with CNN-based networks like PSPNet, FCN, DeepLabV3+, OCRNet, and ISANet, applied in Planet imagery, considering RGB and near-infrared within a large dataset of 1282 image patches (512 × 512 pixels). We later verified the generalization capability of the model for segmenting burned areas in different areas, located in the Brazilian Amazon, which is also worldwide known due to its environmental relevance. As a result, the two transformers based-methods, SegFormer (F1-score equals 95.91%) and DTP (F1-score equals 95.15%), provided the most accurate results in mapping burned forest areas in Pantanal. Results show that the combination of SegFormer and RGB+NIR image with pre-trained weights is the best option (F1-score of 96.52%) to distinguish burned from not-burned areas. When applying the generated model in two Brazilian Amazon forest regions, we achieved F1-score averages of 95.88% for burned areas. We conclude that Transformer-based networks are fit to deal with burned areas in two of the most relevant environmental areas of the world using high-spatial-resolution imagery.