Expert Knowledge-Guided Decision Calibration for Accurate Fine-Grained Tree Species Classification
This work addresses accurate tree species classification for forest inventory and biodiversity monitoring, presenting an incremental improvement through a plug-and-play module.
The paper tackles the problem of fine-grained tree species classification by introducing an Expert Knowledge-Guided Classification Decision Calibration Network (EKDC-Net) to address long-tailed distributions and high inter-class similarity, achieving state-of-the-art performance with a 6.42% accuracy improvement and 11.46% precision gain using only 0.08M additional parameters.
Accurate fine-grained tree species classification is critical for forest inventory and biodiversity monitoring. Existing methods predominantly focus on designing complex architectures to fit local data distributions. However, they often overlook the long-tailed distributions and high inter-class similarity inherent in limited data, thereby struggling to distinguish between few-shot or confusing categories. In the process of knowledge dissemination in the human world, individuals will actively seek expert assistance to transcend the limitations of local thinking. Inspired by this, we introduce an external "Domain Expert" and propose an Expert Knowledge-Guided Classification Decision Calibration Network (EKDC-Net) to overcome these challenges. Our framework addresses two core issues: expert knowledge extraction and utilization. Specifically, we first develop a Local Prior Guided Knowledge Extraction Module (LPKEM). By leveraging Class Activation Map (CAM) analysis, LPKEM guides the domain expert to focus exclusively on discriminative features essential for classification. Subsequently, to effectively integrate this knowledge, we design an Uncertainty-Guided Decision Calibration Module (UDCM). This module dynamically corrects the local model's decisions by considering both overall category uncertainty and instance-level prediction uncertainty. Furthermore, we present a large-scale classification dataset covering 102 tree species, named CU-Tree102 to address the issue of scarce diversity in current benchmarks. Experiments on three benchmark datasets demonstrate that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance. Crucially, as a lightweight plug-and-play module, EKDC-Net improves backbone accuracy by 6.42% and precision by 11.46% using only 0.08M additional learnable parameters. The dataset, code, and pre-trained models are available at https://github.com/WHU-USI3DV/TreeCLS.