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<front>
<journal-meta>
<journal-id journal-id-type="publisher">ISPRS-Archives</journal-id>
<journal-title-group>
<journal-title>The International Archives of the Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences</journal-title>
<abbrev-journal-title abbrev-type="publisher">ISPRS-Archives</abbrev-journal-title>
<abbrev-journal-title abbrev-type="nlm-ta">Int. Arch. Photogramm. Remote Sens. Spatial Inf. Sci.</abbrev-journal-title>
</journal-title-group>
<issn pub-type="epub">2194-9034</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-archives-XLIX-B1-2026-599-2026</article-id>
<title-group>
<article-title>Manual Annotations Meet Fine-Tuned Foundation Models: A Comparison on Tree Crown Segmentation Task</article-title>
</title-group>
<contrib-group><contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Ravindran</surname>
<given-names>Rewanth</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>Steier</surname>
<given-names>Janik</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>Karam</surname>
<given-names>Samer</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>Iwaszczuk</surname>
<given-names>Dorota</given-names>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff1">
<sup>1</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
</contrib-group><aff id="aff1">
<label>1</label>
<addr-line>Technical University of Darmstadt, Dept. of Civil and Environmental Engineering Sciences, Remote Sensing and Image Analysis, Darmstadt, Germany</addr-line>
</aff>
<pub-date pub-type="epub">
<day>22</day>
<month>07</month>
<year>2026</year>
</pub-date>
<volume>XLIX-B1-2026</volume>
<fpage>599</fpage>
<lpage>605</lpage>
<permissions>
<copyright-statement>Copyright: &#x000a9; 2026 Rewanth Ravindran 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-archives.copernicus.org/articles/XLIX-B1-2026/599/2026/isprs-archives-XLIX-B1-2026-599-2026.html">This article is available from https://isprs-archives.copernicus.org/articles/XLIX-B1-2026/599/2026/isprs-archives-XLIX-B1-2026-599-2026.html</self-uri>
<self-uri xlink:href="https://isprs-archives.copernicus.org/articles/XLIX-B1-2026/599/2026/isprs-archives-XLIX-B1-2026-599-2026.pdf">The full text article is available as a PDF file from https://isprs-archives.copernicus.org/articles/XLIX-B1-2026/599/2026/isprs-archives-XLIX-B1-2026-599-2026.pdf</self-uri>
<abstract>
<p>Accurate segmentation of individual tree crowns (ITCs) from remote-sensing imagery is essential for forest monitoring and ecological analysis, yet remains challenging due to overlapping canopies and structural variability. The Segment Anything Model (SAM) shows strong generalization capabilities but requires effective prompting and domain adaptation for remote sensing applications. In this study, we investigate a lightweight fine-tuning strategy using Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) to adapt SAM for ITC segmentation on the BAMFORESTS dataset. The impact of different prompting strategies is evaluated, including manually annotated point and bounding box prompts, as well as automatically generated bounding boxes derived from a pre-trained tree detector. SAM is fine-tuned with instance-level ITC masks, enabling prompt-aware segmentation of multiple tree crowns per image. Performance is assessed before and after fine-tuning using standard instance segmentation metrics, including IoU and F1-score. Results show that LoRA-based adaptation improves mask delineation and robustness to prompt variability, with bounding box prompts consistently outperforming point-based inputs. Automatically generated prompts enable a fully automated workflow, although their effectiveness depends on detection quality. Evaluation on an independent validation site with manually annotated ITC labels shows that the fine-tuned LoRA-SAM model achieves performance comparable to manual annotations, while significantly reducing annotation effort. These findings highlight the importance of prompt design in adapting foundation models for remote sensing tasks and demonstrate that parameter-efficient fine-tuning provides a practical pathway toward scalable ITC segmentation.</p>
</abstract>
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