Detection of Urban Trees Using YOLOv5 from Aerial Images

Urban population concentration and indiscriminate development are causing various environmental problems such as air pollution and heat island phenomena, and causing human resources to deteriorate the damage caused by natural disasters. Urban trees have been proposed as a solution to these urban problems, and actually play an important role, such as providing environmental improvement functions. Accordingly, quantitative measurement and analysis of individual trees in urban trees are required to understand the effect of trees on the urban environment. However, the complexity and diversity of urban trees have a problem of lowering the accuracy of single tree detection. Therefore, we conducted a study to effectively detect trees in Dongjak-gu using high-resolution aerial images that enable effective detection of tree objects and You Only Look Once Version 5 (YOLOv5), which showed excellent performance in object detection. Labeling guidelines for the construction of tree AI learning datasets were generated, and box annotation was performed on Dongjak-gu trees based on this. We tested various scale YOLOv5 models from the constructed dataset and adopted the optimal model to perform more efficient urban tree detection, resulting in significant results of mean Average Precision (mAP) 0.663.