By Mech Frazier, Geographic Information Systems (GIS) Specialist, Northwestern University Libraries The boom of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in recent years has made a significant impact on Geographic Information Systems (GIS), including applications of Deep Learning (DL). Applications of DL have revolutionized GIS tasks, such as detecting sensitive mangrove environments 1 , identifying global building footprints 2 , and even locating beaver complexes in complex forest landscapes 3 . DL, a subset of Machine Learning (ML), uses neural networks to detect objects, classify pixels, and perform segmentation 4 . Recent advancements in DL have led to significant improvements in both model quality and usability, with prebuilt models and tools that simplify workflows. GIS applications like ArcGIS Pro and QGIS have made available tools and plug-ins to streamline the process of DL. This blog post will focus on one aspect of DL: object detection using aerial image...
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