WHU-STree: A Multi-modal Benchmark Dataset for Street Tree Inventory
This provides a valuable resource for researchers and practitioners in urban planning and environmental monitoring, though it is incremental as it builds on existing dataset efforts by expanding scale and modalities.
The authors tackled the lack of comprehensive datasets for automated street tree inventory by introducing WHU-STree, a multi-modal dataset with 21,007 annotated tree instances across 50 species and 2 morphological parameters, collected from two cities, which supports over 10 tasks and benchmarks show its utility for species classification and tree segmentation.
Street trees are vital to urban livability, providing ecological and social benefits. Establishing a detailed, accurate, and dynamically updated street tree inventory has become essential for optimizing these multifunctional assets within space-constrained urban environments. Given that traditional field surveys are time-consuming and labor-intensive, automated surveys utilizing Mobile Mapping Systems (MMS) offer a more efficient solution. However, existing MMS-acquired tree datasets are limited by small-scale scene, limited annotation, or single modality, restricting their utility for comprehensive analysis. To address these limitations, we introduce WHU-STree, a cross-city, richly annotated, and multi-modal urban street tree dataset. Collected across two distinct cities, WHU-STree integrates synchronized point clouds and high-resolution images, encompassing 21,007 annotated tree instances across 50 species and 2 morphological parameters. Leveraging the unique characteristics, WHU-STree concurrently supports over 10 tasks related to street tree inventory. We benchmark representative baselines for two key tasks--tree species classification and individual tree segmentation. Extensive experiments and in-depth analysis demonstrate the significant potential of multi-modal data fusion and underscore cross-domain applicability as a critical prerequisite for practical algorithm deployment. In particular, we identify key challenges and outline potential future works for fully exploiting WHU-STree, encompassing multi-modal fusion, multi-task collaboration, cross-domain generalization, spatial pattern learning, and Multi-modal Large Language Model for street tree asset management. The WHU-STree dataset is accessible at: https://github.com/WHU-USI3DV/WHU-STree.