An app for tree trunk diameter estimation from coarse optical depth maps
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Trunk diameter is related to the overall health and level of carbon sequestration in a tree. Trunk diameter measurement, therefore, is a key task in both forest plot and urban settings. Unlike the traditional approach of manual measurement with a measuring tape or calipers, several recent approaches rely on sophisticated technologies such as LiDAR and time-of-flight cameras that provide fine-grain depth maps, which are used for depth-assisted image segmentation in downstream processing. These technologies are supported only on specialized devices or high-end smartphones. We present a mobile application that uses coarse-grain depth maps derived from an optical sensor, and so can be run on most common Android devices. Moreover, we use a state-of-the-art deep neural network to estimate trunk diameter from an image and its corresponding coarse depth map (RGB-D). We tested our app using a data set collected from four countries and under challenging conditions including occlusion, leaning trees, and irregular shapes and found that our algorithm has a MAE of 1.66 cm and an RMSE of 2.46 cm, which is comparable to accuracy from fine-grain depth maps. Moreover, diameter measurement using our app is >5 times faster than traditional manual surveying. • An AR- and AI-based app for all-in-one tree diameter estimation on entry-level smartphones. • App achieves a MAE of 1.66 cm, comparable to other high-end phone-based solutions. • Facilitates forest inventories by enabling near real-time, low-cost measurements. • Validated across diverse environments, showing robustness under various conditions. • App speeds up data collection, being 5 times faster than traditional methods.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it