# Detecting Environmental Violations with Satellite Imagery in Near Real Time: Land Application under the Clean Water Act

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2208.08919 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.08919/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 13 of its 65 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 18 Aug 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 13 of 13)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [You Only Look Once: Unified, Real-Time Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02640/) (2015)
- [YOLOv3: An Incremental Improvement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.02767/) (2018)
- [Xception: Deep Learning with Depthwise Separable Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02357/) (2016)
- [YOLOv4: Optimal Speed and Accuracy of Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.10934/) (2020)
- [AI and the Everything in the Whole Wide World Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.15366/) (2021)
- [Reduced, Reused and Recycled: The Life of a Dataset in Machine Learning Research](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.01716/) (2021)
- [A Survey on Object Detection in Optical Remote Sensing Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.06201/) (2016)
- [Dual CNN Models for Unsupervised Monocular Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.06324/) (2018)
- [Temporal Cluster Matching for Change Detection of Structures from Satellite Imagery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.09787/) (2021)
- [Mapping industrial poultry operations at scale with deep learning and aerial imagery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10988/) (2021)
- [Enhancing Environmental Enforcement with Near Real-Time Monitoring: Likelihood-Based Detection of Structural Expansion of Intensive Livestock Farms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.14159/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [SeeFar: Satellite Agnostic Multi-Resolution Dataset for Geospatial Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.06776/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This paper introduces a new, highly consequential setting for the use of computer vision for environmental sustainability. Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs) (aka intensive livestock farms or "factory farms") produce significant manure and pollution. Dumping manure in the winter months poses significant environmental risks and violates environmental law in many states. Yet the federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and state agencies have relied primarily on self-reporting to monitor such instances of "land application." Our paper makes four contributions. First, we introduce the environmental, policy, and agricultural setting of CAFOs and land application. Second, we provide a new dataset of high-cadence (daily to weekly) 3m/pixel satellite imagery from 2018-20 for 330 CAFOs in Wisconsin with hand labeled instances of land application (n=57,697). Third, we develop an object detection model to predict land application and a system to perform inference in near real-time. We show that this system effectively appears to detect land application (PR AUC = 0.93) and we uncover several outlier facilities which appear to apply regularly and excessively. Last, we estimate the population prevalence of land application events in Winter 2021/22. We show that the prevalence of land application is much higher than what is self-reported by facilities. The system can be used by environmental regulators and interest groups, one of which piloted field visits based on this system this past winter. Overall, our application demonstrates the potential for AI-based computer vision systems to solve major problems in environmental compliance with near-daily imagery.