Zero-Shot Tree Detection and Segmentation from Aerial Forest Imagery

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Chen, Michelle, Russell, David, Pallavoor, Amritha, Young, Derek, Wu, Jane
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2025
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author Chen, Michelle
Russell, David
Pallavoor, Amritha
Young, Derek
Wu, Jane
author_facet Chen, Michelle
Russell, David
Pallavoor, Amritha
Young, Derek
Wu, Jane
contents Large-scale delineation of individual trees from remote sensing imagery is crucial to the advancement of ecological research, particularly as climate change and other environmental factors rapidly transform forest landscapes across the world. Current RGB tree segmentation methods rely on training specialized machine learning models with labeled tree datasets. While these learning-based approaches can outperform manual data collection when accurate, the existing models still depend on training data that's hard to scale. In this paper, we investigate the efficacy of using a state-of-the-art image segmentation model, Segment Anything Model 2 (SAM2), in a zero-shot manner for individual tree detection and segmentation. We evaluate a pretrained SAM2 model on two tasks in this domain: (1) zero-shot segmentation and (2) zero-shot transfer by using predictions from an existing tree detection model as prompts. Our results suggest that SAM2 not only has impressive generalization capabilities, but also can form a natural synergy with specialized methods trained on in-domain labeled data. We find that applying large pretrained models to problems in remote sensing is a promising avenue for future progress. We make our code available at: https://github.com/open-forest-observatory/tree-detection-framework.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2506_03114
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Zero-Shot Tree Detection and Segmentation from Aerial Forest Imagery
Chen, Michelle
Russell, David
Pallavoor, Amritha
Young, Derek
Wu, Jane
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Large-scale delineation of individual trees from remote sensing imagery is crucial to the advancement of ecological research, particularly as climate change and other environmental factors rapidly transform forest landscapes across the world. Current RGB tree segmentation methods rely on training specialized machine learning models with labeled tree datasets. While these learning-based approaches can outperform manual data collection when accurate, the existing models still depend on training data that's hard to scale. In this paper, we investigate the efficacy of using a state-of-the-art image segmentation model, Segment Anything Model 2 (SAM2), in a zero-shot manner for individual tree detection and segmentation. We evaluate a pretrained SAM2 model on two tasks in this domain: (1) zero-shot segmentation and (2) zero-shot transfer by using predictions from an existing tree detection model as prompts. Our results suggest that SAM2 not only has impressive generalization capabilities, but also can form a natural synergy with specialized methods trained on in-domain labeled data. We find that applying large pretrained models to problems in remote sensing is a promising avenue for future progress. We make our code available at: https://github.com/open-forest-observatory/tree-detection-framework.
title Zero-Shot Tree Detection and Segmentation from Aerial Forest Imagery
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.03114