Label-Efficient 3D Forest Mapping: Self-Supervised and Transfer Learning for Individual, Structural, and Species Analysis

Fuente: arXiv
Salvato in:
Dettagli Bibliografici
Autori principali: Rizaldy, Aldino, Fassnacht, Fabian Ewald, Afifi, Ahmed Jamal, Jiang, Hua, Gloaguen, Richard, Ghamisi, Pedram
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
Soggetti:
Accesso online:
Tags: Aggiungi Tag
Nessun Tag, puoi essere il primo ad aggiungerne!!
_version_ 1866917069715406848
author Rizaldy, Aldino
Fassnacht, Fabian Ewald
Afifi, Ahmed Jamal
Jiang, Hua
Gloaguen, Richard
Ghamisi, Pedram
author_facet Rizaldy, Aldino
Fassnacht, Fabian Ewald
Afifi, Ahmed Jamal
Jiang, Hua
Gloaguen, Richard
Ghamisi, Pedram
contents Detailed structural and species information on individual tree level is increasingly important to support precision forestry, biodiversity conservation, and provide reference data for biomass and carbon mapping. Point clouds from airborne and ground-based laser scanning are currently the most suitable data source to rapidly derive such information at scale. Recent advancements in deep learning improved segmenting and classifying individual trees and identifying semantic tree components. However, deep learning models typically require large amounts of annotated training data which limits further improvement. Producing dense, high-quality annotations for 3D point clouds, especially in complex forests, is labor-intensive and challenging to scale. We explore strategies to reduce dependence on large annotated datasets using self-supervised and transfer learning architectures. Our objective is to improve performance across three tasks: instance segmentation, semantic segmentation, and tree classification using realistic and operational training sets. Our findings indicate that combining self-supervised learning with domain adaptation significantly enhances instance segmentation compared to training from scratch (AP50 +16.98%), self-supervised learning suffices for semantic segmentation (mIoU +1.79%), and hierarchical transfer learning enables accurate classification of unseen species (Jaccard +6.07%). To simplify use and encourage uptake, we integrated the tasks into a unified framework, streamlining the process from raw point clouds to tree delineation, structural analysis, and species classification. Pretrained models reduce energy consumption and carbon emissions by ~21%. This open-source contribution aims to accelerate operational extraction of individual tree information from laser scanning point clouds to support forestry, biodiversity, and carbon mapping.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2511_06331
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Label-Efficient 3D Forest Mapping: Self-Supervised and Transfer Learning for Individual, Structural, and Species Analysis
Rizaldy, Aldino
Fassnacht, Fabian Ewald
Afifi, Ahmed Jamal
Jiang, Hua
Gloaguen, Richard
Ghamisi, Pedram
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Detailed structural and species information on individual tree level is increasingly important to support precision forestry, biodiversity conservation, and provide reference data for biomass and carbon mapping. Point clouds from airborne and ground-based laser scanning are currently the most suitable data source to rapidly derive such information at scale. Recent advancements in deep learning improved segmenting and classifying individual trees and identifying semantic tree components. However, deep learning models typically require large amounts of annotated training data which limits further improvement. Producing dense, high-quality annotations for 3D point clouds, especially in complex forests, is labor-intensive and challenging to scale. We explore strategies to reduce dependence on large annotated datasets using self-supervised and transfer learning architectures. Our objective is to improve performance across three tasks: instance segmentation, semantic segmentation, and tree classification using realistic and operational training sets. Our findings indicate that combining self-supervised learning with domain adaptation significantly enhances instance segmentation compared to training from scratch (AP50 +16.98%), self-supervised learning suffices for semantic segmentation (mIoU +1.79%), and hierarchical transfer learning enables accurate classification of unseen species (Jaccard +6.07%). To simplify use and encourage uptake, we integrated the tasks into a unified framework, streamlining the process from raw point clouds to tree delineation, structural analysis, and species classification. Pretrained models reduce energy consumption and carbon emissions by ~21%. This open-source contribution aims to accelerate operational extraction of individual tree information from laser scanning point clouds to support forestry, biodiversity, and carbon mapping.
title Label-Efficient 3D Forest Mapping: Self-Supervised and Transfer Learning for Individual, Structural, and Species Analysis
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.06331