Daily Papers

Field-boundary maps support crop monitoring, irrigation planning, and yield estimation, but many smallholder parcels span only a few 10 m Sentinel-2 pixels. We introduce Fields of the Planet (FTP), a 3 m PlanetScope companion to Fields of The World (FTW) that pairs the same polygons, seasonal windows, and train/test splits with 133,168 co-registered PlanetScope patch-window targets across 24 countries. FTP evaluates field delineation as parcel recovery by vectorizing predictions before scoring panoptic quality (PQ), object F1, size-stratified PQ, and meter-scale matched-boundary error. Under matched architectures and training recipes, 3 m imagery raises PQ from 21.0 to 35.5, raises PQ on sub-0.5 ha fields from 5.8 to 15.7, and cuts matched-boundary error from 18.6 m to 7.4 m.

Agricultural parcel extraction plays an important role in remote sensing-based agricultural monitoring, supporting parcel surveying, precision management, and ecological assessment. However, existing public benchmarks mainly focus on regular and relatively flat farmland scenes. In contrast, terraced parcels in mountainous regions exhibit stepped terrain, pronounced elevation variation, irregular boundaries, and strong cross-regional heterogeneity, making parcel extraction a more challenging problem that jointly requires visual recognition, semantic discrimination, and terrain-aware geometric understanding. Although recent studies have advanced visual parcel benchmarks and image-text farmland understanding, a unified benchmark for complex terraced parcel extraction under aligned image-text-DEM settings remains absent. To fill this gap, we present GTPBD-MM, the first multimodal benchmark for global terraced parcel extraction. Built upon GTPBD, GTPBD-MM integrates high-resolution optical imagery, structured text descriptions, and DEM data, and supports systematic evaluation under Image-only, Image+Text, and Image+Text+DEM settings. We further propose Elevation and Text guided Terraced parcel network (ETTerra), a multimodal baseline for terraced parcel delineation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that textual semantics and terrain geometry provide complementary cues beyond visual appearance alone, yielding more accurate, coherent, and structurally consistent delineation results in complex terraced scenes.

The developments in the field of generative AI has brought a lot of opportunities for companies, for instance to improve efficiency in customer service and automating tasks. PostNL, the biggest parcel and E-commerce corporation of the Netherlands wants to use generative AI to enhance the communication around track and trace of parcels. During the internship a Minimal Viable Product (MVP) is created to showcase the value of using generative AI technologies, to enhance parcel tracking, analyzing the parcel's journey and being able to communicate about it in an easy to understand manner. The primary goal was to develop an in-house LLM-based system, reducing dependency on external platforms and establishing the feasibility of a dedicated generative AI team within the company. This multi-agent LLM based system aimed to construct parcel journey stories and identify logistical disruptions with heightened efficiency and accuracy. The research involved deploying a sophisticated AI-driven communication system, employing Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) for enhanced response precision, and optimizing large language models (LLMs) tailored to domain specific tasks. The MVP successfully implemented a multi-agent open-source LLM system, called SuperTracy. SuperTracy is capable of autonomously managing a broad spectrum of user inquiries and improving internal knowledge handling. Results and evaluation demonstrated technological innovation and feasibility, notably in communication about the track and trace of a parcel, which exceeded initial expectations. These advancements highlight the potential of AI-driven solutions in logistics, suggesting many opportunities for further refinement and broader implementation within PostNL operational framework.

Due to the steadily rising amount of valuable goods in supply chains, tampering detection for parcels is becoming increasingly important. In this work, we focus on the use-case last-mile delivery, where only a single RGB image is taken and compared against a reference from an existing database to detect potential appearance changes that indicate tampering. We propose a tampering detection pipeline that utilizes keypoint detection to identify the eight corner points of a parcel. This permits applying a perspective transformation to create normalized fronto-parallel views for each visible parcel side surface. These viewpoint-invariant parcel side surface representations facilitate the identification of signs of tampering on parcels within the supply chain, since they reduce the problem to parcel side surface matching with pair-wise appearance change detection. Experiments with multiple classical and deep learning-based change detection approaches are performed on our newly collected TAMpering detection dataset for PARcels, called TAMPAR. We evaluate keypoint and change detection separately, as well as in a unified system for tampering detection. Our evaluation shows promising results for keypoint (Keypoint AP 75.76) and tampering detection (81% accuracy, F1-Score 0.83) on real images. Furthermore, a sensitivity analysis for tampering types, lens distortion and viewing angles is presented. Code and dataset are available at https://a-nau.github.io/tampar.

The ability to measure and track the speed and trajectory of a community's post-disaster recovery is essential to inform resource allocation and prioritization. The current survey-based approaches to examining community recovery, however, have significant lags and put the burden of data collection on affected people. Also, the existing literature lacks quantitative measures for important milestones to inform the assessment of recovery trajectory. Recognizing these gaps, this study uses location-based data related to visitation patterns and credit card transactions to specify critical recovery milestones related to population activity recovery. Using data from 2017 Hurricane Harvey in Harris County (Texas), the study specifies four critical post-disaster recovery milestones and calculates quantitative measurements of the length of time between the end of a hazard event and when the spatial areas (census tracts) reached these milestones based on fluctuations in visits to essential and non-essential facilities, and essential and non-essential credit card transactions. Accordingly, an integrated recovery metric is created for an overall measurement of each spatial area's recovery progression. Exploratory statistical analyses were conducted to examine whether variations in community recovery progression in achieving the critical milestones is correlated to its flood status, socioeconomic characteristics, and demographic composition. Finally, the extent of spatial inequality is examined. The results show the presence of moderate spatial inequality in population activity recovery in Hurricane Harvey, based upon which the inequality of recovery is measured. Results of this study can benefit post-disaster recovery resource allocation as well as improve community resilience towards future natural hazards.

Agricultural parcels serve as basic units for conducting agricultural practices and applications, which is vital for land ownership registration, food security assessment, soil erosion monitoring, etc. However, existing agriculture parcel extraction studies only focus on mid-resolution mapping or regular plain farmlands while lacking representation of complex terraced terrains due to the demands of precision agriculture.In this paper, we introduce a more fine-grained terraced parcel dataset named GTPBD (Global Terraced Parcel and Boundary Dataset), which is the first fine-grained dataset covering major worldwide terraced regions with more than 200,000 complex terraced parcels with manual annotation. GTPBD comprises 47,537 high-resolution images with three-level labels, including pixel-level boundary labels, mask labels, and parcel labels. It covers seven major geographic zones in China and transcontinental climatic regions around the world.Compared to the existing datasets, the GTPBD dataset brings considerable challenges due to the: (1) terrain diversity; (2) complex and irregular parcel objects; and (3) multiple domain styles. Our proposed GTPBD dataset is suitable for four different tasks, including semantic segmentation, edge detection, terraced parcel extraction, and unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) tasks.Accordingly, we benchmark the GTPBD dataset on eight semantic segmentation methods, four edge extraction methods, three parcel extraction methods, and five UDA methods, along with a multi-dimensional evaluation framework integrating pixel-level and object-level metrics. GTPBD fills a critical gap in terraced remote sensing research, providing a basic infrastructure for fine-grained agricultural terrain analysis and cross-scenario knowledge transfer.

In this work we introduce Sen4AgriNet, a Sentinel-2 based time series multi country benchmark dataset, tailored for agricultural monitoring applications with Machine and Deep Learning. Sen4AgriNet dataset is annotated from farmer declarations collected via the Land Parcel Identification System (LPIS) for harmonizing country wide labels. These declarations have only recently been made available as open data, allowing for the first time the labeling of satellite imagery from ground truth data. We proceed to propose and standardise a new crop type taxonomy across Europe that address Common Agriculture Policy (CAP) needs, based on the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) Indicative Crop Classification scheme. Sen4AgriNet is the only multi-country, multi-year dataset that includes all spectral information. It is constructed to cover the period 2016-2020 for Catalonia and France, while it can be extended to include additional countries. Currently, it contains 42.5 million parcels, which makes it significantly larger than other available archives. We extract two sub-datasets to highlight its value for diverse Deep Learning applications; the Object Aggregated Dataset (OAD) and the Patches Assembled Dataset (PAD). OAD capitalizes zonal statistics of each parcel, thus creating a powerful label-to-features instance for classification algorithms. On the other hand, PAD structure generalizes the classification problem to parcel extraction and semantic segmentation and labeling. The PAD and OAD are examined under three different scenarios to showcase and model the effects of spatial and temporal variability across different years and different countries.

Digitization of scanned receipts aims to extract text from receipt images and save it into structured documents. This is usually split into two sub-tasks: text localization and optical character recognition (OCR). Most existing OCR models only focus on the cropped text instance images, which require the bounding box information provided by a text region detection model. Introducing an additional detector to identify the text instance images in advance adds complexity, however instance-level OCR models have very low accuracy when processing the whole image for the document-level OCR, such as receipt images containing multiple text lines arranged in various layouts. To this end, we propose a localization-free document-level OCR model for transcribing all the characters in a receipt image into an ordered sequence end-to-end. Specifically, we finetune the pretrained instance-level model TrOCR with randomly cropped image chunks, and gradually increase the image chunk size to generalize the recognition ability from instance images to full-page images. In our experiments on the SROIE receipt OCR dataset, the model finetuned with our strategy achieved 64.4 F1-score and a 22.8% character error rate (CER), respectively, which outperforms the baseline results with 48.5 F1-score and 50.6% CER. The best model, which splits the full image into 15 equally sized chunks, gives 87.8 F1-score and 4.98% CER with minimal additional pre or post-processing of the output. Moreover, the characters in the generated document-level sequences are arranged in the reading order, which is practical for real-world applications.

Accurate agricultural field boundary delineation at large scale is a foundational task for food security, supply chain transparency, and carbon accounting. While vision foundation models like SAM show remarkable zero-shot capabilities, they frequently fail in geospatial domains due to topological complexity, cropland texturing patterns, and a lack of physical scale awareness. In this work, we introduce Delineate Anything v2, a globally scalable foundation model designed specifically for wide-area field boundary mapping. We construct FBIS-73M, a 73-million-instance multi-resolution dataset spanning 61 countries. To address the pervasive issue of multi-field administrative parcel merging, we introduce a resolution-specific data curation pipeline that leverages topological image-space adaptation to homogenize merged parcels and strengthen weak physical boundaries. Furthermore, we establish a novel, manually curated evaluation benchmark covering 100 countries to assess independent zero-shot generalization. Our results show that Delineate Anything v2 surpasses the current state-of-the-art, including the Delineate Anything framework, by 0.284 mAP@0.5 (+103.3% relative gain), while maintaining execution speeds suitable for rapid national- and global-scale deployment, as demonstrated by nationwide mapping of Ukraine (603,000 km^2) in 5.4 hours on a consumer-grade workstation. Code, pre-trained weights, the FBIS-73M dataset, and ready-to-use national-scale vector boundary products are publicly available at https://github.com/Lavreniuk/Delineate-Anything.