Multimodal Urban Tree Detection from Satellite and Street-Level Imagery via Annotation-Efficient Deep Learning Strategies

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Hauptverfasser: Kim, In Seon, Moghimi, Ali
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2026
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author Kim, In Seon
Moghimi, Ali
author_facet Kim, In Seon
Moghimi, Ali
contents Beyond the immediate biophysical benefits, urban trees play a foundational role in environmental sustainability and disaster mitigation. Precise mapping of urban trees is essential for environmental monitoring, post-disaster assessment, and strengthening policy. However, the transition from traditional, labor-intensive field surveys to scalable automated systems remains limited by high annotation costs and poor generalization across diverse urban scenarios. This study introduces a multimodal framework that integrates high-resolution satellite imagery with ground-level Google Street View to enable scalable and detailed urban tree detection under limited-annotation conditions. The framework first leverages satellite imagery to localize tree candidates and then retrieves targeted ground-level views for detailed detection, significantly reducing inefficient street-level sampling. To address the annotation bottleneck, domain adaptation is used to transfer knowledge from an existing annotated dataset to a new region of interest. To further minimize human effort, we evaluated three learning strategies: semi-supervised learning, active learning, and a hybrid approach combining both, using a transformer-based detection model. The hybrid strategy achieved the best performance with an F1-score of 0.90, representing a 12% improvement over the baseline model. In contrast, semi-supervised learning exhibited progressive performance degradation due to confirmation bias in pseudo-labeling, while active learning steadily improved results through targeted human intervention to label uncertain or incorrect predictions. Error analysis further showed that active and hybrid strategies reduced both false positives and false negatives. Our findings highlight the importance of a multimodal approach and guided annotation for scalable, annotation-efficient urban tree mapping to strengthen sustainable city planning.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_03505
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Multimodal Urban Tree Detection from Satellite and Street-Level Imagery via Annotation-Efficient Deep Learning Strategies
Kim, In Seon
Moghimi, Ali
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Beyond the immediate biophysical benefits, urban trees play a foundational role in environmental sustainability and disaster mitigation. Precise mapping of urban trees is essential for environmental monitoring, post-disaster assessment, and strengthening policy. However, the transition from traditional, labor-intensive field surveys to scalable automated systems remains limited by high annotation costs and poor generalization across diverse urban scenarios. This study introduces a multimodal framework that integrates high-resolution satellite imagery with ground-level Google Street View to enable scalable and detailed urban tree detection under limited-annotation conditions. The framework first leverages satellite imagery to localize tree candidates and then retrieves targeted ground-level views for detailed detection, significantly reducing inefficient street-level sampling. To address the annotation bottleneck, domain adaptation is used to transfer knowledge from an existing annotated dataset to a new region of interest. To further minimize human effort, we evaluated three learning strategies: semi-supervised learning, active learning, and a hybrid approach combining both, using a transformer-based detection model. The hybrid strategy achieved the best performance with an F1-score of 0.90, representing a 12% improvement over the baseline model. In contrast, semi-supervised learning exhibited progressive performance degradation due to confirmation bias in pseudo-labeling, while active learning steadily improved results through targeted human intervention to label uncertain or incorrect predictions. Error analysis further showed that active and hybrid strategies reduced both false positives and false negatives. Our findings highlight the importance of a multimodal approach and guided annotation for scalable, annotation-efficient urban tree mapping to strengthen sustainable city planning.
title Multimodal Urban Tree Detection from Satellite and Street-Level Imagery via Annotation-Efficient Deep Learning Strategies
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.03505