Xenia  Zhao

Xenia Zhao

Scholar Title

MIT EECS | Morais and Rosenblum Undergraduate Research and Innovation Scholar

Research Title

Mapping Tree Species in Drone Imagery

Cohort

2024ā€“2025

Department

Electrical Engineering and Computer Science

Research Areas
  • Graphics and Vision
Supervisor

Sara Beery

Abstract

Mapping plant species in forest ecosystems is crucial to advance our understanding of forest ecology, invasive species mitigation, carbon sequestration potential, and more. UAV-based surveys both have high resolution and are economically scalable, but are not often used in natural scenes due to matching ambiguity and articulated geometry (e.g. due to wind). The goal of this project is to research adapting ML-based species mapping approaches to use unprocessed UAV imagery. This project seeks to (1) develop approaches for sampling of informative views while (2) minimizing duplicate manual labeling effort and (3) computing geolocation by reconstructing geometry, with the end goal of (4) accurately labeling and categorizing plant species or health.

Quote

Iā€™m participating in superUROP because I want to work on interesting research problems, and this is a great opportunity to learn from the experts in the field. As an AI major who has taken Advances in Computer Vision, I feel lucky to be able to use computer vision in my project on such an impactful topic as mapping forests.

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