Chactún multiclass detector

Mask R-CNN R50-FPN that detects three classes of ancient Maya feature — building, platform, aguada — in airborne lidar relief visualizations of the central Yucatán Peninsula.

Trained on the Chactún ML-ready dataset (Kokalj et al. 2023), on the ECML PKDD 2021 discovery challenge's own training split. Full experimental record, including four claims that later measurement refuted, in benjbritton/geoai-detection.

What this is for

Candidate generation, not a census. The catalogue this model produces is a probabilistic candidate layer for landscape survey. Individual detections should be treated accordingly — see Limitations.

Input specification — read this before using it on other data

The model was trained on a specific rendering, and it is only as portable as that rendering is reproducible. Three bands at 0.5 m:

These are the general-terrain settings from Table 3 of Kokalj et al. 2023. Applying a different stretch to the same physical quantities produces a representation the model has not seen, and performance degrades in ways that are not obvious from the output. Matching band statistics is not the same as applying the same stretch function — that was measured, and it was worse than doing nothing.

Results

Evaluated on the challenge's held-out split (tiles 1765–2093). Single seed.

For context, the published leaderboard field on that split runs 0.811–0.834 semantic IoU. Those entries are five-fold ensembles with pseudo-labeling and test-time augmentation; this is a single model. A semantic-segmentation baseline trained at matched compute scores 0.809, which locates most of the difference in the instance-versus-semantic formulation rather than in training effort.

Operating point matters more than AP for survey use. Pooled over all 2,094 tiles, at score 0.05 the detector recalls 92% of annotated structures at 188 false positives per km²; at 0.50, 75% recall at 32 FP/km². Choose against the cost of a field visit, not against the metric.

How it was trained

Mask R-CNN R50-FPN, COCO-pretrained, detectron2. The one intervention that moved the problem was D4 augmentation — the eight symmetries of a square — worth +4.16 AP over the control across five-fold cross-validation, 95% CI [+2.70, +5.61], positive on every fold, and replicated at +4.17 on this split.

It is valid here because these three bands are computed isotropically, so a rotation is label-preserving. It would not be valid on hillshade, where a fixed illumination azimuth is baked into the pixels.

Four model-side interventions were tested and came in within noise: shifted anchors, a cascade head, 960 px input, and repeat-factor oversampling. Their confidence intervals all contain zero.

Limitations

• Aguada is band-limited, not underlearned. These three bands emphasise raised features; an aguada is a depression, and it differs from background by about two counts where a building differs by 45–60. The dataset's own authors used a fourth visualization (local dominance) by hand to trace aguada edges. More training data will not fix this; a different band would.
• Karst ambiguity. Weathered limestone outcrops and rejollada margins resemble informal non-rectilinear platforms. This constrains manual interpretation equally.
• Resolution envelope roughly 0.33–1 m once tiling is handled by ground extent rather than pixel count. Aguada is the first casualty of coarse data.
• Validation optimism. Chactún tiles resemble one another closely enough that every validation tile has a near-twin in training under any partition. The dataset carries no georeferencing, so a spatially blocked split is not possible — that is deliberate geomasking by the dataset authors, to protect undocumented sites from looting.
• Single seed for the figures above. The cross-validated numbers carry intervals; these do not.

Would a zero-shot detector do instead?

It was measured, on this model's own validation split, so the comparison is like for like: same 329 tiles, same annotations, bbox AP through the same COCOeval path.

Neither zero-shot result is noise — both sit well above a size-matched random-box null — but a factor of fourteen is not a gap that prompt engineering closes. On overhead optical imagery the same checkpoints do considerably better, reaching about a quarter of their supervised counterpart rather than a fourteenth, which suggests the shortfall is about the imagery rather than about these particular structures.

Two practical findings from that work transfer to anyone prompting these models on terrain visualizations. Describing shape beats naming the class, replicated across both model families. And confidence is anti-correlated with correctness off-distribution: Grounding DINO's highest-scoring boxes were whole-tile in every arm, so no score threshold recovers a usable detector, though an area prior removes the degenerate band trivially.

Method, figures and code: https://github.com/benjbritton/geoai-detection

Attribution and licence

Weights released CC BY 4.0, matching the training data.

Kokalj, Ž., Somrak, M., et al. (2023). Machine learning-ready remote sensing data for Maya archaeology. Scientific Data 10:558. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-023-02455-x

If you use this model, cite the dataset. The code is MIT; the weights inherit CC BY 4.0 from the data.

Files

The GeoJSON follows the coordinate space of the input and records which it used, as coordinate_space. A georeferenced raster gives map coordinates in its own CRS. The Chactun tiles are ungeoreferenced by design, so they give pixel coordinates, and the script says so when it runs.