SelvaMask: Segmenting Trees in Tropical Forests and Beyond

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Duguay, Simon-Olivier, Baudchon, Hugo, Laliberté, Etienne, Muller-Landau, Helene, Rivas-Torres, Gonzalo, Ouaknine, Arthur
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2026
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author Duguay, Simon-Olivier
Baudchon, Hugo
Laliberté, Etienne
Muller-Landau, Helene
Rivas-Torres, Gonzalo
Ouaknine, Arthur
author_facet Duguay, Simon-Olivier
Baudchon, Hugo
Laliberté, Etienne
Muller-Landau, Helene
Rivas-Torres, Gonzalo
Ouaknine, Arthur
contents Tropical forests harbor most of the planet's tree biodiversity and are critical to global ecological balance. Canopy trees in particular play a disproportionate role in carbon storage and functioning of these ecosystems. Studying canopy trees at scale requires accurate delineation of individual tree crowns, typically performed using high-resolution aerial imagery. Despite advances in transformer-based models for individual tree crown segmentation, performance remains low in most forests, especially tropical ones. To this end, we introduce SelvaMask, a new tropical dataset containing over 8,800 manually delineated tree crowns across three Neotropical forest sites in Panama, Brazil, and Ecuador. SelvaMask features comprehensive annotations, including an inter-annotator agreement evaluation, capturing the dense structure of tropical forests and highlighting the difficulty of the task. Leveraging this benchmark, we propose a modular detection-segmentation pipeline that adapts vision foundation models (VFMs), using domain-specific detection-prompter. Our approach reaches state-of-the-art performance, outperforming both zero-shot generalist models and fully supervised end-to-end methods in dense tropical forests. We validate these gains on external tropical and temperate datasets, demonstrating that SelvaMask serves as both a challenging benchmark and a key enabler for generalized forest monitoring. Our code and dataset will be released publicly.
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id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2602_02426
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle SelvaMask: Segmenting Trees in Tropical Forests and Beyond
Duguay, Simon-Olivier
Baudchon, Hugo
Laliberté, Etienne
Muller-Landau, Helene
Rivas-Torres, Gonzalo
Ouaknine, Arthur
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
I.2.10; I.4.8; I.4.9; I.5.4
Tropical forests harbor most of the planet's tree biodiversity and are critical to global ecological balance. Canopy trees in particular play a disproportionate role in carbon storage and functioning of these ecosystems. Studying canopy trees at scale requires accurate delineation of individual tree crowns, typically performed using high-resolution aerial imagery. Despite advances in transformer-based models for individual tree crown segmentation, performance remains low in most forests, especially tropical ones. To this end, we introduce SelvaMask, a new tropical dataset containing over 8,800 manually delineated tree crowns across three Neotropical forest sites in Panama, Brazil, and Ecuador. SelvaMask features comprehensive annotations, including an inter-annotator agreement evaluation, capturing the dense structure of tropical forests and highlighting the difficulty of the task. Leveraging this benchmark, we propose a modular detection-segmentation pipeline that adapts vision foundation models (VFMs), using domain-specific detection-prompter. Our approach reaches state-of-the-art performance, outperforming both zero-shot generalist models and fully supervised end-to-end methods in dense tropical forests. We validate these gains on external tropical and temperate datasets, demonstrating that SelvaMask serves as both a challenging benchmark and a key enabler for generalized forest monitoring. Our code and dataset will be released publicly.
title SelvaMask: Segmenting Trees in Tropical Forests and Beyond
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
I.2.10; I.4.8; I.4.9; I.5.4
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.02426