# Zero-Shot Tree Detection and Segmentation from Aerial Forest Imagery

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.03114 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.03114/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 7 of its 24 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 3 Jun 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02643/) (2023)
- [Masked Autoencoders Are Scalable Vision Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06377/) (2021)
- [Mask R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06870/) (2017)
- [SAM 2: Segment Anything in Images and Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.00714/) (2024)
- [Hiera: A Hierarchical Vision Transformer without the Bells-and-Whistles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.00989/) (2023)
- [Depth Any Canopy: Leveraging Depth Foundation Models for Canopy Height Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.04523/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [SelvaMask: Segmenting Trees in Tropical Forests and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.02426/) (2026)
- [Benchmarking individual tree segmentation using multispectral airborne laser scanning data: the FGI-EMIT dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.00653/) (2025)
- [Learning Image-based Tree Crown Segmentation from Enhanced Lidar-based Pseudo-labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.13022/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

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.