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Automatic tree identification and position using high-resolution remote sensing images are critical for ecological garden planning, management, and large-scale environmental quality detection. However, existing single-tree detection methods have a high rate of misdetection in forests not only due to the similarity of background and crown colors but also because light and shadow caused abnormal crown shapes, resulting in a high rate of misdetections and missed detection. This article uses urban plantations as the primary research sample. In conjunction with the most recent deep learning method for object detection, a single-tree detection method based on the lite fourth edition of you only look once (YOLOv4-Lite) was proposed. YOLOv4’s object detection framework has been simplified, and the MobileNetv3 convolutional neural network is used as the primary feature extractor to reduce the number of parameters. Data enhancement is performed for categories with fewer single-tree samples, and the loss function is optimized using focal loss. The YOLOv4-Lite method is used to detect single trees on campus, in an orchard, and an economic plantation. Not only is the YOLOv4-Lite method compared to traditional methods such as the local maximum value method and the watershed method, where it outperforms them by nearly 46.1%, but also to novel methods such as the Chan-Vese model and the template matching method, where it outperforms them by nearly 26.4%. The experimental results for single-tree detection demonstrate that the YOLOv4-Lite method improves accuracy and robustness by nearly 36.2%. Our work establishes a reference for the application of YOLOv4-Lite in additional agricultural and plantation products.