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Big data driven detection of trees in suburban scenes using visual spectrum eye level photography

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Thirlwell_2020_Sensors_Bigdata_CC.pdf (27.57Mb)
Date
28/05/2020
Author
Thirlwell, Andrew
Arandjelović, Ognjen
Keywords
Computer vision
Local features
Machine learning
Street view
Tree stumps
QA75 Electronic computers. Computer science
T Technology
DAS
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Abstract
The aim of the work described in this paper is to detect trees in eye level view images. Unlike previous work that universally considers highly constrained environments, such as natural parks and wooded areas, or simple scenes with little clutter and clear tree separation, our focus is on much more challenging suburban scenes, which are rich in clutter and highly variable in type and appearance (houses, falls, shrubs, cars, bicycles, pedestrians, hydrants, lamp posts, etc.). Thus, we motivate and introduce three different approaches: (i) a conventional computer vision based approach, employing manually engineered steps and making use of explicit human knowledge of the application domain, (ii) a more machine learning oriented approach, which learns from densely extracted local features in the form of scale invariant features (SIFT), and (iii) a machine learning based approach, which employs both colour and appearance models as a means of making the most of available discriminative information. We also make a significant contribution in regards to the collection of training and evaluation data. In contrast to the existing work, which relies on manual data collection (thus risking unintended bias) or corpora constrained in variability and limited in size (thus not allowing for reliable generalisation inferences to be made), we show how large amounts of representative data can be collected automatically using freely available tools, such as Google’s Street View, and equally automatically processed to produce a large corpus of minimally biased imagery. Using a large data set collected in the manner and comprising tens of thousands of images, we confirm our theoretical arguments that motivated our machine learning based and colour-aware histograms of oriented gradients based method, which achieved a recall of 95% and precision of 97%.
Citation
Thirlwell , A & Arandjelović , O 2020 , ' Big data driven detection of trees in suburban scenes using visual spectrum eye level photography ' , Sensors , vol. 20 , no. 11 , 3051 . https://doi.org/10.3390/s20113051
Publication
Sensors
Status
Peer reviewed
DOI
https://doi.org/10.3390/s20113051
ISSN
1424-8220
Type
Journal article
Rights
Copyright © 2020 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
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  • University of St Andrews Research
URI
http://hdl.handle.net/10023/20044

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