Automated Segmentation of Brick Kilns and Carbon Emission Analysis Using Deep Learning and Life Cycle Assessment

India's brick sector produces over 350 billion bricks annually, making it a critical contributor to greenhouse gas emissions and air pollution. Despite this significance, comprehensive quantification of brick kiln carbon footprint emissions remains limited due to the absence of systematic kiln inventories. This study presents a novel approach that integrates object detection technology with Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) to quantify the carbon footprint of brick production, explicitly incorporating soil organic carbon (SOC) dynamics, a previously overlooked component in brick kiln emission accounting. YOLOv7 was used for automated detection and segmentation of brick kilns in Southwest Bengal (Haldia and Purba Medinipur) using open-source Google Earth Pro imagery. The model demonstrated robust performance with detection precision, recall, and F1-score of 0.881, 0.827, and 0.853 respectively, while instance segmentation achieved a mean IoU of 0.706 with precision 0.837, recall 0.818, and F1-score 0.827. 

The cradle-to-gate LCA reveals a total carbon footprint of 499.87 g CO₂/brick according to our methodology. SOC loss alone contributes 159.85 g CO₂/brick (32% of total emissions), establishing it as a major, previously unaccounted source. Fuel combustion (coal, biomass, agricultural residues) contributes 331.32 g CO₂/brick on average, while transportation adds 7.04 g CO₂/brick. For the 1,042 detected kilns, the estimated annual production capacity is 6.9 billion bricks, corresponding to total emissions of 3.46 Mt CO₂ under current operating conditions. This study is the first to systematically incorporate SOC-based carbon accounting into brick kiln emission assessments, substantially revising the perceived climate burden of the sector. By combining automated kiln detection with comprehensive LCA, the work provides a robust framework for environmental monitoring and supports SDG 13, 9, 11, 12, and 15 through improved emission accounting, land and resource management, and the design of regulatory instruments, carbon offset schemes, and incentives for cleaner brick production.