The inter-university team from the applied mathematics club working at the Department of MMDA, consisting of Yevhenii Salii, Volodymyr Kuzin (students of the Department of Mathematical Modeling and Data Analysis) and Anton Hohol (National University “Kyiv-Mohyla Academy”) under the leadership of Prof. Nataliia Kussul and PhD Hanna Yailymova, won the 1st place in the 2nd stage of the Black Sea Science International Student Research Competition.
In their work “Machine learning models and technology for classification of forest on satellite data” (section Information technologies, automation and robotics), the team developed a deep learning algorithm for forest classification maps creation based on satellite data using existing historical datasets as training data. The obtained model can be applied to satellite data for the required year and for the required area of interest, and as a result, obtain a modern map of the forest divided into two classes – broadleaved and coniferous.
According to the results of the work, a scientific paper has already been submitted to the international European conference IEEE EUROCON 2023.
The work was carried out within the international forest monitoring project SWIFTT (Satellites for Wilderness Inspection and Forest Threat Tracking – https://swiftt.eu/), which is aimed at tracking forest diseases and other possible risks for forests using satellite data. The team also actively uses the CREODIAS European cloud platform for processing satellite images and neural network algorithms thanks to grant within OCRE project (Open clouds for research environments) and EO4UA initiative.
The international competition of student scientific works “Black Sea Science” is held annually on the basis of the Odessa National University of Technology under the auspices of the Black Sea Universities Network and ISEKI-Food Association. At the first stage of the competition were 378 works from Ukrainian and foreign institutions have been submitted, including from 40 universities in countries such as Germany, Oman, Algeria, Lithuania, India, Serbia, Croatia, Pakistan, Poland, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Bulgaria, Moldova. In each field, the finalists have been determined (25% of peer-reviewed works according to the rating). They were invited to participate in the second stage of the competition. The second stage of the competition began on March 23, 2023. Finalists were invited to present their work at an online conference. Based on the results of the presentation and the participant’s report, the jury chooses the winners.
The results of the competition can be viewed at the link.