Sparse Data Tree Canopy Segmentation: Fine-Tuning Leading Pretrained Models on Only 150 Images
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arXiv
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| Autori principali: | , , , , , |
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| Natura: | Preprint |
| Pubblicazione: |
2026
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| _version_ | 1866914529793802240 |
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| author | Szczecina, David Sun, Hudson Bertnyk, Anthony Azad, Niloofar Gao, Kyle Xu, Lincoln Linlin |
| author_facet | Szczecina, David Sun, Hudson Bertnyk, Anthony Azad, Niloofar Gao, Kyle Xu, Lincoln Linlin |
| contents | Tree canopy detection from aerial imagery is an important task for environmental monitoring, urban planning, and ecosystem analysis. Simulating real-life data annotation scarcity, the Solafune Tree Canopy Detection competition provides a small and imbalanced dataset of only 150 annotated images, posing significant challenges for training deep models without severe overfitting. In this work, we evaluate five representative architectures, YOLOv11, Mask R-CNN, DeepLabv3, Swin-UNet, and DINOv2, to assess their suitability for canopy segmentation under extreme data scarcity. Our experiments show that pretrained convolution-based models, particularly YOLOv11 and Mask R-CNN, generalize significantly better than pretrained transformer-based models. DeeplabV3, Swin-UNet and DINOv2 underperform likely due to differences between semantic and instance segmentation tasks, the high data requirements of Vision Transformers, and the lack of strong inductive biases. These findings confirm that transformer-based architectures struggle in low-data regimes without substantial pretraining or augmentation and that differences between semantic and instance segmentation further affect model performance. We provide a detailed analysis of training strategies, augmentation policies, and model behavior under the small-data constraint and demonstrate that lightweight CNN-based methods remain the most reliable for canopy detection on limited imagery. |
| format | Preprint |
| id |
arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2601_10931 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2026 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | Sparse Data Tree Canopy Segmentation: Fine-Tuning Leading Pretrained Models on Only 150 Images Szczecina, David Sun, Hudson Bertnyk, Anthony Azad, Niloofar Gao, Kyle Xu, Lincoln Linlin Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Artificial Intelligence 68T05 I.2.6 Tree canopy detection from aerial imagery is an important task for environmental monitoring, urban planning, and ecosystem analysis. Simulating real-life data annotation scarcity, the Solafune Tree Canopy Detection competition provides a small and imbalanced dataset of only 150 annotated images, posing significant challenges for training deep models without severe overfitting. In this work, we evaluate five representative architectures, YOLOv11, Mask R-CNN, DeepLabv3, Swin-UNet, and DINOv2, to assess their suitability for canopy segmentation under extreme data scarcity. Our experiments show that pretrained convolution-based models, particularly YOLOv11 and Mask R-CNN, generalize significantly better than pretrained transformer-based models. DeeplabV3, Swin-UNet and DINOv2 underperform likely due to differences between semantic and instance segmentation tasks, the high data requirements of Vision Transformers, and the lack of strong inductive biases. These findings confirm that transformer-based architectures struggle in low-data regimes without substantial pretraining or augmentation and that differences between semantic and instance segmentation further affect model performance. We provide a detailed analysis of training strategies, augmentation policies, and model behavior under the small-data constraint and demonstrate that lightweight CNN-based methods remain the most reliable for canopy detection on limited imagery. |
| title | Sparse Data Tree Canopy Segmentation: Fine-Tuning Leading Pretrained Models on Only 150 Images |
| topic | Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Artificial Intelligence 68T05 I.2.6 |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.10931 |