{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/zero-shot-tree-detection-and-segmentation","title":"Zero-Shot Tree Detection and Segmentation from Aerial Forest Imagery","arxiv_id":"2506.03114","date":"2025-06-03","proceeding":null,"authors":["Michelle Chen","David Russell","Amritha Pallavoor","Derek Young","Jane Wu"],"abstract":"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.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.03114v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.03114v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"zero-shot-tree-detection-and-segmentation","repo_url":"https://github.com/open-forest-observatory/tree-detection-framework","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"image-segmentation","task_name":"Image Segmentation"},{"task_slug":"segmentation","task_name":"Segmentation"},{"task_slug":"semantic-segmentation","task_name":"Semantic Segmentation"},{"task_slug":"zero-shot-segmentation","task_name":"Zero Shot Segmentation"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}