Meet the Winners of the Farm Pin Crop Detection Challenge
The United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals #2 is “Zero Hunger” by 2030. Hunger and malnutrition remain a significant barrier to development in many regions, particularly in Africa. Approximately 27.4% of the population in Africa was classified as severely food insecure in 2016, which is almost four times as high as any other region.
Accurate data are critical for counties striving to improve food security and agricultural growth. Sub-Saharan Africa in particular struggles with incomplete or unreliable data on the agricultural sector. In 2018, the international community organized to launch the 50 X 2030 initiative, a commitment to collect better farm data with the goal of ending hunger.
The objective of this competition is to create a machine learning model to classify fields by crop type using Sentinel-2 satellite imagery. The fields in this training set are along the Orange River, a major agricultural region in South Africa that has been stricken by drought in recent years.
The dataset contains 3,000+ fields total. You will have the satellite images of the entire region across 11 time slices in one year. Each of the fields are a polygon in a shape file. The crops growing in each of these fields were verified by a combination of in-person surveying and drones.
The relatively small size of some of the fields (compared to datasets of industrial farming in other countries like the US) may present a particular challenge to crop recognition, but the size of these fields is not unusual for Africa.
This resulting model will enable Farm Pin to help their clients including government entities monitor agricultural activity at a lower cost and more quickly. This is also a stepping stone to more advanced predictive analytics such as crop yield prediction.
This competition is sponsored by Farm Pin, Microsoft, Liquid Telecom, and Cortex Logic.
About Farm Pin (farmpin.com)
FarmPin provides farmer-friendly analytics, from space. Farmers can make better decisions with our maps & graphs of field health & moisture. We are based in sunny Cape Town and were incubated by AfroLabs and Agro Innovation Lab.
About Microsoft (microsoft.com)
Microsoft (Nasdaq “MSFT” @microsoft) enables digital transformation for the era of an intelligent cloud and an intelligent edge. Microsoft has operated in Africa for more than 25 years. In that time they have built strong partnerships across the continent, helped bridge gaps in infrastructure, connectivity and capability, and are working to empower countries in Africa to digitally transform while creating sustained societal impact. Earlier this year, Microsoft opened Africa’s first hyper-scale data centers in Johannesburg and Cape Town, South Africa. Most recently, the company also announced the opening of two Africa Development Centers in Nairobi and Lagos, where world class African talent can create innovative solutions for local and global impact.
About Liquid Telecom (liquidtelecom.com)
Liquid Telecom is the leading independent data, voice and IP provider in eastern, central and southern Africa. It supplies fibre optic, satellite and international carrier services to Africa's largest mobile network operators, ISPs and businesses of all sizes. It also provides payment solutions to financial institutions and retailers, as well as award winning data storage and communication solutions to businesses across Africa and beyond. Put simply, we connect people.
About Cortex Logic (cortexlogic.com)
Cortex Logic is an African Artificial Intelligence (AI) software and solutions company that helps businesses thrive in the Smart Technology Era. We provide an AI Engine for Business that solves strategic and operationally relevant problems by leveraging Data Science, Internet of Things (IoT) and Big Data & Analytics. We help platform businesses and corporates operationalise real word AI by unlocking the value from all available structured and unstructured data and supporting you through the change programme to deliver the step change and business advantage AI based technologies offer. We work in all major market segments with clients in banking, insurance, healthcare, mining, manufacturing, retail and tel coms.
Teams and collaboration
You may participate in this competition as an individual or in a team of up to four people. When creating a team, the team must have a total submission count less than or equal to the maximum allowable submissions as of the formation date. A team will be allowed the maximum number of submissions for the competition, minus the highest number of submissions among team members at team formation. Prizes are transferred only to the individual players or to the team leader.
Multiple accounts per user are not permitted, and neither is collaboration or membership across multiple teams. Individuals and their submissions originating from multiple accounts will be disqualified.
Code must not be shared privately outside of a team. Any code that is shared, must be made available to all competition participants through the platform. (i.e. on the discussion boards).
Datasets and packages
The solution must use publicly-available, open-source packages only. Your models should not use any of the metadata provided.
You may use only the datasets provided for this competition.
The data used in this competition is the sole property of Zindi and the competition host. You may not transmit, duplicate, publish, redistribute or otherwise provide or make available any competition data to any party not participating in the Competition (this includes uploading the data to any public site such as Kaggle or GitHub). You may upload, store and work with the data on any cloud platform such as Google Colab, AWS or similar, as long as 1) the data remains private and 2) doing so does not contravene Zindi’s rules of use.
You must notify Zindi immediately upon learning of any unauthorised transmission of or unauthorised access to the competition data, and work with Zindi to rectify any unauthorised transmission or access.
Your solution must not infringe the rights of any third party and you must be legally entitled to assign ownership of all rights of copyright in and to the winning solution code to Zindi.
Submissions and winning
You may make a maximum of 10 submissions per day. Your highest-scoring solution on the private leaderboard at the end of the competition will be the one by which you are judged.
As the challenge has now closed, the maximum number of submissions per day is 30.
Zindi maintains a public leaderboard and a private leaderboard for each competition. The Public Leaderboard includes approximately 20% of the test dataset. While the competition is open, the Public Leaderboard will rank the submitted solutions by the accuracy score they achieve. Upon close of the competition, the Private Leaderboard, which covers 100% of the test dataset, will be made public and will constitute the final ranking for the competition.
If you are in the top 20 at the time the leaderboard closes, we will email you to request your code. On receipt of email, you will have 48 hours to respond and submit your code following the submission guidelines detailed below. Failure to respond will result in disqualification.
If your solution places 1st, 2nd, or 3rd on the final leaderboard, you will be required to submit your winning solution code to us for verification, and you thereby agree to assign all worldwide rights of copyright in and to such winning solution to Zindi.
If two solutions earn identical scores on the leaderboard, the tiebreaker will be the date and time in which the submission was made (the earlier solution will win).
The winners will be paid via bank transfer, PayPal, or other international money transfer platform. International transfer fees will be deducted from the total prize amount, unless the prize money is under $500, in which case the international transfer fees will be covered by Zindi. In all cases, the winners are responsible for any other fees applied by their own bank or other institution for receiving the prize money. All taxes imposed on prizes are the sole responsibility of the winners.
You acknowledge and agree that Zindi may, without any obligation to do so, remove or disqualify an individual, team, or account if Zindi believes that such individual, team, or account is in violation of these rules. Entry into this competition constitutes your acceptance of these official competition rules.
Please refer to the FAQs and Terms of Use for additional rules that may apply to this competition. We reserve the right to update these rules at any time.
Reproducibility
- All data used
- Output data and where they are stored
- Explanation of features used
- Your solution must include the original data provided by Zindi and validated external data (no processed data)
- All editing of data must be done in a notebook (i.e. not manually in Excel)
Data standards:
- You must use the most recent versions of packages. Custom packages in your submission notebook will not be accepted.
- You may only use tools available to everyone i.e. no paid services or free trials that require a credit card.
Consequences of breaking any rules of the competition or submission guidelines:
Monitoring of submissions
Further updates and rulings of note:
We reserve the right to update these rules at any time.
The evaluation metric for this challenge is the Log Loss.
Your submission file should look like:
Field_ID Crop_ID_1 Crop_ID_2 Crop_ID_3 Crop_ID_4 ..... Crop_ID_9 <string> <number> <number> <number> <number> <number> 5 .034 .215 .567 .975 .123
1st Place: $6 500 USD
2nd Place: $3 300 USD
3rd Place: $1 200 USD
Competition closes on 15 September 2019
Final submissions must be received by 11:59 PM GMT.
We reserve the right to update the contest timeline if necessary.