Benchmarking Anchor-Based and Anchor-Free State-of-the-Art Deep Learning Methods for Individual Tree Detection in RGB High-Resolution Images

Urban forests contribute to maintaining livability and increase the resilience of cities in the face of population growth and climate change. Information about the geographical distribution of individual trees is essential for the proper management of these systems. RGB high-resolution aerial images have emerged as a cheap and efficient source of data, although detecting and mapping single trees in an urban environment is a challenging task. Thus, we propose the evaluation of novel methods for single tree crown detection, as most of these methods have not been investigated in remote sensing applications. A total of 21 methods were investigated, including anchor-based (one and two-stage) and anchor-free state-of-the-art deep-learning methods. We used two orthoimages divided into 220 non-overlapping patches of 512 x 512 pixels with a ground sample distance (GSD) of 10 cm. The orthoimages were manually annotated, and 3382 single tree crowns were identified as the ground-truth. Our findings show that the anchor-free detectors achieved the best average performance with an AP50 of 0.686. We observed that the two-stage anchor-based and anchor-free methods showed better performance for this task, emphasizing the FSAF, Double Heads, CARAFE, ATSS, and FoveaBox models. RetinaNet, which is currently commonly applied in remote sensing, did not show satisfactory performance, and Faster R-CNN had lower results than the best methods but with no statistically significant difference. Our findings contribute to a better understanding of the performance of novel deep-learning methods in remote sensing applications and could be used as an indicator of the most suitable methods in such applications.

Automated summary

This study proposed the evaluation of novel methods for single tree crown detection in urban environments and found the best-performing anchor-free detectors among 21 investigated methods, highlighting several excellent models. These findings contribute to a better understanding of the performance of novel deep-learning methods in remote sensing applications.