# Detection and Geographic Localization of Natural Objects in the Wild: A Case Study on Palms

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.13023 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.13023/

## Key facts

- Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 15 of its 41 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 18 Feb 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 15 of 15)

- [Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02643/) (2023)
- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [Grad-CAM: Visual Explanations from Deep Networks via Gradient-based Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02391/) (2016)
- [SAM 2: Segment Anything in Images and Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.00714/) (2024)
- [DINO: DETR with Improved DeNoising Anchor Boxes for End-to-End Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.03605/) (2022)
- [DETRs Beat YOLOs on Real-time Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08069/) (2023)
- [Object Detection in 20 Years: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.05055/) (2019)
- [YOLOv10: Real-Time End-to-End Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.14458/) (2024)
- [YOLOv9: Learning What You Want to Learn Using Programmable Gradient Information](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.13616/) (2024)
- [Faster Segment Anything: Towards Lightweight SAM for Mobile Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.14289/) (2023)
- [Dense Distinct Query for End-to-End Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.12776/) (2023)
- [On Calibration of Object Detectors: Pitfalls, Evaluation and Baselines](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.20459/) (2024)
- [CPDR: Towards Highly-Efficient Salient Object Detection via Crossed Post-decoder Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.06441/) (2025)
- [PalmProbNet: A Probabilistic Approach to Understanding Palm Distributions in Ecuadorian Tropical Forest via Transfer Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.03161/) (2024)
- [Rethinking Remote Sensing Change Detection With A Mask View](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.15320/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [K2VAE: A Koopman-Kalman Enhanced Variational AutoEncoder for Probabilistic Time Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.23017/) (2025)
- [From Orthomosaics to Raw UAV Imagery: Enhancing Palm Detection and Crown-Center Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.12400/) (2025)
- [Learning Where to Embed: Noise-Aware Positional Embedding for Query Retrieval in Small-Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.15065/) (2026)
- [Cott-ADNet: Lightweight Real-Time Cotton Boll and Flower Detection Under Field Conditions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.12442/) (2025)
- [CFMD: Dynamic Cross-layer Feature Fusion for Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.01326/) (2025)
- [AwakeForest: An Interactive Geospatial Platform for Large-Scale Forest Imagery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.23542/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Palms are ecologically and economically indicators of tropical forest health, biodiversity, and human impact that support local economies and global forest product supply chains. While palm detection in plantations is well-studied, efforts to map naturally occurring palms in dense forests remain limited by overlapping crowns, uneven shading, and heterogeneous landscapes. We develop PRISM (Processing, Inference, Segmentation, and Mapping), a flexible pipeline for detecting and localizing palms in dense tropical forests using large orthomosaic images. Orthomosaics are created from thousands of aerial images and spanning several to hundreds of gigabytes. Our contributions are threefold. First, we construct a large UAV-derived orthomosaic dataset collected across 21 ecologically diverse sites in western Ecuador, annotated with 8,830 bounding boxes and 5,026 palm center points. Second, we evaluate multiple state-of-the-art object detectors based on efficiency and performance, integrating zero-shot SAM 2 as the segmentation backbone, and refining the results for precise geographic mapping. Third, we apply calibration methods to align confidence scores with IoU and explore saliency maps for feature explainability. Though optimized for palms, PRISM is adaptable for identifying other natural objects, such as eastern white pines. Future work will explore transfer learning for lower-resolution datasets (0.5 to 1m).