SWIFTT partner presents work at the 27th International Conference on Discovery Science

17 October 2024

Vito Recchia, SWIFTT partner from UNIBA, attended the 27th International Conference on Discovery Science (DS 2024) on October 14-16, in Pisa, Italy, and presented the paper entitled “Avalon: An attention-based CNN approach to detect forest tree dieback caused by insect outbreak in Sentinel-2 images”.

Authored by Vito Recchia, Giuseppina Andresini, Annalisa Appice, Gianpietro Fontana, and Donato Malerba, the paper proposes a deep learning-based approach, named AVALON, that implements a CNN to detect tree dieback events in Sentinel-2 images of forest areas. To this aim, each pixel of a Sentinel-2 image is transformed into an imagery representation that sees the pixel within its surrounding pixel neighbourhood. The authors incorporate an attention mechanism into the CNN architecture to gain accuracy and achieve useful insights from the explanations of the spatial arrangement of model decisions. They assess the effectiveness of the proposed approach in two case studies regarding forest scenes in the Northeast of France and the Czech Republic, which were monitored using Sentinel-2 satellite in October 2018 and September 2020, respectively. Both case studies host bark beetle outbreaks in the considered periods.

Learn more about the event in the link below.