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<front>
<journal-meta>
<journal-id journal-id-type="publisher">ISPRS-Annals</journal-id>
<journal-title-group>
<journal-title>ISPRS Annals of the Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences</journal-title>
<abbrev-journal-title abbrev-type="publisher">ISPRS-Annals</abbrev-journal-title>
<abbrev-journal-title abbrev-type="nlm-ta">ISPRS Ann. Photogramm. Remote Sens. Spatial Inf. Sci.</abbrev-journal-title>
</journal-title-group>
<issn pub-type="epub">2194-9050</issn>
<publisher><publisher-name>Copernicus Publications</publisher-name>
<publisher-loc>Göttingen, Germany</publisher-loc>
</publisher>
</journal-meta>
<article-meta>
<article-id pub-id-type="doi">10.5194/isprs-annals-XI-1-2026-271-2026</article-id>
<title-group>
<article-title>Weakly-Supervised Learning for Tree Instances Segmentation in Airborne Lidar Point Clouds</article-title>
</title-group>
<contrib-group><contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Destouches</surname>
<given-names>Swann Emilien Céleste</given-names>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff1">
<sup>1</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
<contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Lahaye</surname>
<given-names>Jesse</given-names>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff1">
<sup>1</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
<contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Jospin</surname>
<given-names>Laurent V.</given-names>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff1">
<sup>1</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
<contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Skaloud</surname>
<given-names>Jan</given-names>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff1">
<sup>1</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
</contrib-group><aff id="aff1">
<label>1</label>
<addr-line>Environmental Sensing &amp; Observation Laboratory (ESO), Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland</addr-line>
</aff>
<pub-date pub-type="epub">
<day>03</day>
<month>07</month>
<year>2026</year>
</pub-date>
<volume>XI-1-2026</volume>
<fpage>271</fpage>
<lpage>278</lpage>
<permissions>
<copyright-statement>Copyright: &#x000a9; 2026 Swann Emilien Céleste Destouches et al.</copyright-statement>
<copyright-year>2026</copyright-year>
<license license-type="open-access">
<license-p>This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this licence, visit <ext-link ext-link-type="uri"  xlink:href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/</ext-link></license-p>
</license>
</permissions>
<self-uri xlink:href="https://isprs-annals.copernicus.org/articles/XI-1-2026/271/2026/isprs-annals-XI-1-2026-271-2026.html">This article is available from https://isprs-annals.copernicus.org/articles/XI-1-2026/271/2026/isprs-annals-XI-1-2026-271-2026.html</self-uri>
<self-uri xlink:href="https://isprs-annals.copernicus.org/articles/XI-1-2026/271/2026/isprs-annals-XI-1-2026-271-2026.pdf">The full text article is available as a PDF file from https://isprs-annals.copernicus.org/articles/XI-1-2026/271/2026/isprs-annals-XI-1-2026-271-2026.pdf</self-uri>
<abstract>
<p>Tree instance segmentation of airborne laser scanning (ALS) data is of utmost importance for forest monitoring but remains challenging due to variations in the data caused by factors such as sensor resolution, vegetation state at acquisition time, terrain characteristics, etc. Moreover, obtaining a sufficient amount of precisely labeled data to train fully supervised instance segmentation methods is expensive. To address these challenges, we propose a weakly supervised approach where labels of an initial segmentation result obtained either by a non-finetuned model or a closed-form algorithm are rated by a human operator. The labels produced during the quality assessment are then used to train a rating model, whose task is to classify a segmentation output into the same classes as specified by the human operator. Finally, the segmentation model is finetuned using feedback from the rating model. This in turn improves the original segmentation model by 34% in terms of correctly identified tree instances while considerably reducing the number of non-tree instances predicted. Challenges still remain in data over sparsely forested regions characterized by small trees (less than two meters in height) or within complex surroundings containing shrubs, boulders, etc. which can be confused as trees causing the performance of the proposed method to be reduced.</p>
</abstract>
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