Treepedia 2.0: Applying Deep Learning for Large-Scale Quantification of Urban Tree Cover

Recent advances in deep learning have made it possible to quantify urban metrics at fine resolution, and over large extents using street-level images. Here, we focus on measuring urban tree cover using Google Street View (GSV) images. First, we provide a small-scale labelled validation dataset and propose standard metrics to compare the performance of automated estimations of street tree cover using GSV. We apply state-of-the-art deep learning models, and compare their performance to a previously established benchmark of an unsupervised method. Our training procedure for deep learning models is novel; we utilize the abundance of openly available and similarly labelled street-level image datasets to pre-train our model. We then perform additional training on a small training dataset consisting of GSV images. We find that deep learning models significantly outperform the unsupervised benchmark method. Our semantic segmentation model increased mean intersection-over-union (IoU) from 44.10% to 60.42% relative to the unsupervised method and our end-to-end model decreased Mean Absolute Error from 10.04% to 4.67%. We also employ a recently developed method called gradient-weighted class activation map (Grad-CAM) to interpret the features learned by the end-to-end model. This technique confirms that the end-to-end model has accurately learned to identify tree cover area as key features for predicting percentage tree cover. Our paper provides an example of applying advanced deep learning techniques on a large-scale, geo-tagged and image-based dataset to efficiently estimate important urban metrics. The results demonstrate that deep learning models are highly accurate, can be interpretable, and can also be efficient in terms of data-labelling effort and computational resources.