Detection and tracking of barchan dunes using artificial intelligence

Barchans are crescent-shape dunes ubiquitous on Earth and other celestial bodies, which are organized in barchan fields where they interact with each other. Over the last decades, satellite images have been largely employed to detect barchans on Earth and on the surface of Mars, with AI (Artificial Intelligence) becoming an important tool for monitoring those bedforms. However, automatic detection reported in previous works is limited to isolated dunes and does not identify successfully groups of interacting barchans. In this paper, we inquire into the automatic detection and tracking of barchans by carrying out experiments and exploring the acquired images using AI. After training a neural network with images from controlled experiments where complex interactions took place between dunes, we did the same for satellite images from Earth and Mars. We show, for the first time, that a neural network trained properly can identify and track barchans interacting with each other in different environments, using different image types (contrasts, colors, points of view, resolutions, etc.), with confidence scores (accuracy) above 70%. Our results represent a step further for automatically monitoring barchans, with important applications for human activities on Earth, Mars and other celestial bodies.