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Oct 27

AgriFM: A Multi-source Temporal Remote Sensing Foundation Model for Crop Mapping

Accurate crop mapping fundamentally relies on modeling multi-scale spatiotemporal patterns, where spatial scales range from individual field textures to landscape-level context, and temporal scales capture both short-term phenological transitions and full growing-season dynamics. Transformer-based remote sensing foundation models (RSFMs) offer promising potential for crop mapping due to their innate ability for unified spatiotemporal processing. However, current RSFMs remain suboptimal for crop mapping: they either employ fixed spatiotemporal windows that ignore the multi-scale nature of crop systems or completely disregard temporal information by focusing solely on spatial patterns. To bridge these gaps, we present AgriFM, a multi-source remote sensing foundation model specifically designed for agricultural crop mapping. Our approach begins by establishing the necessity of simultaneous hierarchical spatiotemporal feature extraction, leading to the development of a modified Video Swin Transformer architecture where temporal down-sampling is synchronized with spatial scaling operations. This modified backbone enables efficient unified processing of long time-series satellite inputs. AgriFM leverages temporally rich data streams from three satellite sources including MODIS, Landsat-8/9 and Sentinel-2, and is pre-trained on a global representative dataset comprising over 25 million image samples supervised by land cover products. The resulting framework incorporates a versatile decoder architecture that dynamically fuses these learned spatiotemporal representations, supporting diverse downstream tasks. Comprehensive evaluations demonstrate AgriFM's superior performance over conventional deep learning approaches and state-of-the-art general-purpose RSFMs across all downstream tasks. Codes will be available at https://github.com/flyakon/AgriFM.

  • 10 authors
·
May 27, 2025

Adaptive Fusion of Multi-view Remote Sensing data for Optimal Sub-field Crop Yield Prediction

Accurate crop yield prediction is of utmost importance for informed decision-making in agriculture, aiding farmers, and industry stakeholders. However, this task is complex and depends on multiple factors, such as environmental conditions, soil properties, and management practices. Combining heterogeneous data views poses a fusion challenge, like identifying the view-specific contribution to the predictive task. We present a novel multi-view learning approach to predict crop yield for different crops (soybean, wheat, rapeseed) and regions (Argentina, Uruguay, and Germany). Our multi-view input data includes multi-spectral optical images from Sentinel-2 satellites and weather data as dynamic features during the crop growing season, complemented by static features like soil properties and topographic information. To effectively fuse the data, we introduce a Multi-view Gated Fusion (MVGF) model, comprising dedicated view-encoders and a Gated Unit (GU) module. The view-encoders handle the heterogeneity of data sources with varying temporal resolutions by learning a view-specific representation. These representations are adaptively fused via a weighted sum. The fusion weights are computed for each sample by the GU using a concatenation of the view-representations. The MVGF model is trained at sub-field level with 10 m resolution pixels. Our evaluations show that the MVGF outperforms conventional models on the same task, achieving the best results by incorporating all the data sources, unlike the usual fusion results in the literature. For Argentina, the MVGF model achieves an R2 value of 0.68 at sub-field yield prediction, while at field level evaluation (comparing field averages), it reaches around 0.80 across different countries. The GU module learned different weights based on the country and crop-type, aligning with the variable significance of each data source to the prediction task.

  • 14 authors
·
Jan 22, 2024

In the Search for Optimal Multi-view Learning Models for Crop Classification with Global Remote Sensing Data

Studying and analyzing cropland is a difficult task due to its dynamic and heterogeneous growth behavior. Usually, diverse data sources can be collected for its estimation. Although deep learning models have proven to excel in the crop classification task, they face substantial challenges when dealing with multiple inputs, named Multi-View Learning (MVL). The methods used in the MVL scenario can be structured based on the encoder architecture, the fusion strategy, and the optimization technique. The literature has primarily focused on using specific encoder architectures for local regions, lacking a deeper exploration of other components in the MVL methodology. In contrast, we investigate the simultaneous selection of the fusion strategy and encoder architecture, assessing global-scale cropland and crop-type classifications. We use a range of five fusion strategies (Input, Feature, Decision, Ensemble, Hybrid) and five temporal encoders (LSTM, GRU, TempCNN, TAE, L-TAE) as possible configurations in the MVL method. We use the CropHarvest dataset for validation, which provides optical, radar, weather time series, and topographic information as input data. We found that in scenarios with a limited number of labeled samples, a unique configuration is insufficient for all the cases. Instead, a specialized combination should be meticulously sought, including an encoder and fusion strategy. To streamline this search process, we suggest identifying the optimal encoder architecture tailored for a particular fusion strategy, and then determining the most suitable fusion strategy for the classification task. We provide a methodological framework for researchers exploring crop classification through an MVL methodology.

  • 3 authors
·
Mar 25, 2024 1

WeedsGalore: A Multispectral and Multitemporal UAV-based Dataset for Crop and Weed Segmentation in Agricultural Maize Fields

Weeds are one of the major reasons for crop yield loss but current weeding practices fail to manage weeds in an efficient and targeted manner. Effective weed management is especially important for crops with high worldwide production such as maize, to maximize crop yield for meeting increasing global demands. Advances in near-sensing and computer vision enable the development of new tools for weed management. Specifically, state-of-the-art segmentation models, coupled with novel sensing technologies, can facilitate timely and accurate weeding and monitoring systems. However, learning-based approaches require annotated data and show a lack of generalization to aerial imaging for different crops. We present a novel dataset for semantic and instance segmentation of crops and weeds in agricultural maize fields. The multispectral UAV-based dataset contains images with RGB, red-edge, and near-infrared bands, a large number of plant instances, dense annotations for maize and four weed classes, and is multitemporal. We provide extensive baseline results for both tasks, including probabilistic methods to quantify prediction uncertainty, improve model calibration, and demonstrate the approach's applicability to out-of-distribution data. The results show the effectiveness of the two additional bands compared to RGB only, and better performance in our target domain than models trained on existing datasets. We hope our dataset advances research on methods and operational systems for fine-grained weed identification, enhancing the robustness and applicability of UAV-based weed management. The dataset and code are available at https://github.com/GFZ/weedsgalore

  • 6 authors
·
Feb 17, 2025

Agriculture-Vision: A Large Aerial Image Database for Agricultural Pattern Analysis

The success of deep learning in visual recognition tasks has driven advancements in multiple fields of research. Particularly, increasing attention has been drawn towards its application in agriculture. Nevertheless, while visual pattern recognition on farmlands carries enormous economic values, little progress has been made to merge computer vision and crop sciences due to the lack of suitable agricultural image datasets. Meanwhile, problems in agriculture also pose new challenges in computer vision. For example, semantic segmentation of aerial farmland images requires inference over extremely large-size images with extreme annotation sparsity. These challenges are not present in most of the common object datasets, and we show that they are more challenging than many other aerial image datasets. To encourage research in computer vision for agriculture, we present Agriculture-Vision: a large-scale aerial farmland image dataset for semantic segmentation of agricultural patterns. We collected 94,986 high-quality aerial images from 3,432 farmlands across the US, where each image consists of RGB and Near-infrared (NIR) channels with resolution as high as 10 cm per pixel. We annotate nine types of field anomaly patterns that are most important to farmers. As a pilot study of aerial agricultural semantic segmentation, we perform comprehensive experiments using popular semantic segmentation models; we also propose an effective model designed for aerial agricultural pattern recognition. Our experiments demonstrate several challenges Agriculture-Vision poses to both the computer vision and agriculture communities. Future versions of this dataset will include even more aerial images, anomaly patterns and image channels. More information at https://www.agriculture-vision.com.

  • 15 authors
·
Jan 5, 2020

INF-LLaVA: Dual-perspective Perception for High-Resolution Multimodal Large Language Model

With advancements in data availability and computing resources, Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have showcased capabilities across various fields. However, the quadratic complexity of the vision encoder in MLLMs constrains the resolution of input images. Most current approaches mitigate this issue by cropping high-resolution images into smaller sub-images, which are then processed independently by the vision encoder. Despite capturing sufficient local details, these sub-images lack global context and fail to interact with one another. To address this limitation, we propose a novel MLLM, INF-LLaVA, designed for effective high-resolution image perception. INF-LLaVA incorporates two innovative components. First, we introduce a Dual-perspective Cropping Module (DCM), which ensures that each sub-image contains continuous details from a local perspective and comprehensive information from a global perspective. Second, we introduce Dual-perspective Enhancement Module (DEM) to enable the mutual enhancement of global and local features, allowing INF-LLaVA to effectively process high-resolution images by simultaneously capturing detailed local information and comprehensive global context. Extensive ablation studies validate the effectiveness of these components, and experiments on a diverse set of benchmarks demonstrate that INF-LLaVA outperforms existing MLLMs. Code and pretrained model are available at https://github.com/WeihuangLin/INF-LLaVA.

  • 7 authors
·
Jul 23, 2024 3

Global-Local Similarity for Efficient Fine-Grained Image Recognition with Vision Transformers

Fine-grained recognition involves the classification of images from subordinate macro-categories, and it is challenging due to small inter-class differences. To overcome this, most methods perform discriminative feature selection enabled by a feature extraction backbone followed by a high-level feature refinement step. Recently, many studies have shown the potential behind vision transformers as a backbone for fine-grained recognition, but their usage of its attention mechanism to select discriminative tokens can be computationally expensive. In this work, we propose a novel and computationally inexpensive metric to identify discriminative regions in an image. We compare the similarity between the global representation of an image given by the CLS token, a learnable token used by transformers for classification, and the local representation of individual patches. We select the regions with the highest similarity to obtain crops, which are forwarded through the same transformer encoder. Finally, high-level features of the original and cropped representations are further refined together in order to make more robust predictions. Through extensive experimental evaluation we demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method, obtaining favorable results in terms of accuracy across a variety of datasets. Furthermore, our method achieves these results at a much lower computational cost compared to the alternatives. Code and checkpoints are available at: https://github.com/arkel23/GLSim.

  • 3 authors
·
Jul 17, 2024

Unsupervised Learning of Visual Features by Contrasting Cluster Assignments

Unsupervised image representations have significantly reduced the gap with supervised pretraining, notably with the recent achievements of contrastive learning methods. These contrastive methods typically work online and rely on a large number of explicit pairwise feature comparisons, which is computationally challenging. In this paper, we propose an online algorithm, SwAV, that takes advantage of contrastive methods without requiring to compute pairwise comparisons. Specifically, our method simultaneously clusters the data while enforcing consistency between cluster assignments produced for different augmentations (or views) of the same image, instead of comparing features directly as in contrastive learning. Simply put, we use a swapped prediction mechanism where we predict the cluster assignment of a view from the representation of another view. Our method can be trained with large and small batches and can scale to unlimited amounts of data. Compared to previous contrastive methods, our method is more memory efficient since it does not require a large memory bank or a special momentum network. In addition, we also propose a new data augmentation strategy, multi-crop, that uses a mix of views with different resolutions in place of two full-resolution views, without increasing the memory or compute requirements much. We validate our findings by achieving 75.3% top-1 accuracy on ImageNet with ResNet-50, as well as surpassing supervised pretraining on all the considered transfer tasks.

  • 6 authors
·
Jun 17, 2020

YieldSAT: A Multimodal Benchmark Dataset for High-Resolution Crop Yield Prediction

Crop yield prediction requires substantial data to train scalable models. However, creating yield prediction datasets is constrained by high acquisition costs, heterogeneous data quality, and data privacy regulations. Consequently, existing datasets are scarce, low in quality, or limited to regional levels or single crop types, hindering the development of scalable data-driven solutions. In this work, we release YieldSAT, a large, high-quality, and multimodal dataset for high-resolution crop yield prediction. YieldSAT spans various climate zones across multiple countries, including Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, and Germany, and includes major crop types, including corn, rapeseed, soybeans, and wheat, across 2,173 expert-curated fields. In total, over 12.2 million yield samples are available, each with a spatial resolution of 10 m. Each field is paired with multispectral satellite imagery, resulting in 113,555 labeled satellite images, complemented by auxiliary environmental data. We demonstrate the potential of large-scale and high-resolution crop yield prediction as a pixel regression task by comparing various deep learning models and data fusion architectures. Furthermore, we highlight open challenges arising from severe distribution shifts in the ground truth data under real-world conditions. To mitigate this, we explore a domain-informed Deep Ensemble approach that exhibits significant performance gains. The dataset is available at https://yieldsat.github.io/.

CropVLM: A Domain-Adapted Vision-Language Model for Open-Set Crop Analysis

High-throughput plant phenotyping, the quantitative measurement of observable plant traits, is critical for modern breeding but remains constrained by a "phenotyping bottleneck," where manual data collection is labor-intensive and prone to observer bias. Conventional closed-set computer vision systems fail to address this challenge, as they require extensive species-specific annotation and lack the flexibility to handle diverse breeding populations. To bridge this gap, we present CropVLM, a Vision-Language Model (VLM) adapted for the agricultural domain via Domain-Specific Semantic Alignment (DSSA). Trained on 52,987 manually selected image-caption pairs covering 37 species in natural field conditions, CropVLM effectively maps agronomic terminology to fine-grained visual features. We further introduce the Hybrid Open-Set Localization Network (HOS-Net), an architecture that integrates CropVLM to enable the detection of novel crops solely from natural language descriptions without retraining. By eliminating the reliance on species-specific training data, CropVLM provides a scalable solution for high-throughput phenotyping, accelerating genetic gain and facilitating large-scale biodiversity research essential for sustainable agriculture. The trained model weights and complete pipeline implementation are publicly available at: [https://github.com/boudiafA/CropVLM](https://github.com/boudiafA/CropVLM). In comprehensive evaluations, CropVLM achieves 72.51% zero-shot classification accuracy, outperforming seven CLIP-style baselines. Our detection pipeline demonstrates superior zero-shot generalization to novel species, achieving 49.17 AP50 on our CVTCropDet benchmark and 50.73 AP50 on tropical fruit species, compared to 34.89 and 48.58 for the next-best method, respectively.

  • 2 authors
·
May 4

Generalized Decoupled Learning for Enhancing Open-Vocabulary Dense Perception

Dense visual perception tasks have been constrained by their reliance on predefined categories, limiting their applicability in real-world scenarios where visual concepts are unbounded. While Vision-Language Models (VLMs) like CLIP have shown promise in open-vocabulary tasks, their direct application to dense perception often leads to suboptimal performance due to limitations in local feature representation. In this work, we present our observation that CLIP's image tokens struggle to effectively aggregate information from spatially or semantically related regions, resulting in features that lack local discriminability and spatial consistency. To address this issue, we propose DeCLIP, a novel framework that enhances CLIP by decoupling the self-attention module to obtain ``content'' and ``context'' features respectively. The context features are enhanced by jointly distilling semantic correlations from Vision Foundation Models (VFMs) and object integrity cues from diffusion models, thereby enhancing spatial consistency. In parallel, the content features are aligned with image crop representations and constrained by region correlations from VFMs to improve local discriminability. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DeCLIP establishes a solid foundation for open-vocabulary dense perception, consistently achieving state-of-the-art performance across a broad spectrum of tasks, including 2D detection and segmentation, 3D instance segmentation, video instance segmentation, and 6D object pose estimation. Code is available at https://github.com/xiaomoguhz/DeCLIP

  • 7 authors
·
Aug 15, 2025

Can Large Multimodal Models Understand Agricultural Scenes? Benchmarking with AgroMind

Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) has demonstrated capabilities across various domains, but comprehensive benchmarks for agricultural remote sensing (RS) remain scarce. Existing benchmarks designed for agricultural RS scenarios exhibit notable limitations, primarily in terms of insufficient scene diversity in the dataset and oversimplified task design. To bridge this gap, we introduce AgroMind, a comprehensive agricultural remote sensing benchmark covering four task dimensions: spatial perception, object understanding, scene understanding, and scene reasoning, with a total of 13 task types, ranging from crop identification and health monitoring to environmental analysis. We curate a high-quality evaluation set by integrating eight public datasets and one private farmland plot dataset, containing 25,026 QA pairs and 15,556 images. The pipeline begins with multi-source data preprocessing, including collection, format standardization, and annotation refinement. We then generate a diverse set of agriculturally relevant questions through the systematic definition of tasks. Finally, we employ LMMs for inference, generating responses, and performing detailed examinations. We evaluated 18 open-source LMMs and 3 closed-source models on AgroMind. Experiments reveal significant performance gaps, particularly in spatial reasoning and fine-grained recognition, it is notable that human performance lags behind several leading LMMs. By establishing a standardized evaluation framework for agricultural RS, AgroMind reveals the limitations of LMMs in domain knowledge and highlights critical challenges for future work. Data and code can be accessed at https://rssysu.github.io/AgroMind/.

  • 13 authors
·
May 17, 2025

Crop mapping in the small sample/no sample case: an approach using a two-level cascade classifier and integrating domain knowledge

Mapping crops using remote sensing technology is important for food security and land management. Machine learning-based methods has become a popular approach for crop mapping in recent years. However, the key to machine learning, acquiring ample and accurate samples, is usually time-consuming and laborious. To solve this problem, a crop mapping method in the small sample/no sample case that integrating domain knowledge and using a cascaded classification framework that combine a weak classifier learned from samples with strong features and a strong classifier trained by samples with weak feature was proposed. First, based on the domain knowledge of various crops, a low-capacity classifier such as decision tree was applied to acquire those pixels with distinctive features and complete observation sequences as "strong feature" samples. Then, to improve the representativeness of these samples, sample augmentation strategy that artificially remove the observations of "strong feature" samples according to the average valid observation proportion in target area was applied. Finally, based on the original samples and augmented samples, a large-capacity classifier such as random forest was trained for crop mapping. The method achieved an overall accuracy of 82% in the MAP crop recognition competition held by Syngenta Group, China in 2021 (third prize, ranked fourth). This method integrates domain knowledge to overcome the difficulties of sample acquisition, providing a convenient, fast and accurate solution for crop mapping.

  • 11 authors
·
Dec 25, 2022

AgroSense 2.0: Cross-Modal Transformer Fusion with Geospatial Raster Integration and Interpretable Multi-Task Learning for Precision Crop Recommendation

Crop recommendation systems in precision agriculture have long suffered from a fundamental modality gap: visual soil characterization and chemical nutrient profiling are typically treated as independent inference problems, with fusion often reduced to late-stage feature concatenation. AgroSense~2.0 addresses this limitation through three architectural advances. First, we introduce continental-scale geospatial integration via a seven-band soil raster (india\_soil\_7bands.tif) spanning India, encoding Nitrogen, pH, SOC, Clay, Sand, Silt, and Bulk Density as 32times32 spatial patches, a modality entirely absent from prior work. Second, we replace naive feature concatenation with a cross-modal Transformer fusion module, where tabular nutrient features attend over image representations via multi-head attention, enabling richer inter-modal dependency modeling than shallow fusion. Third, we adopt a multi-task objective jointly optimizing soil classification and crop recommendation through a shared backbone, improving generalization via complementary cross-task signal. To enhance interpretability, we apply TreeSHAP to the tabular branch, revealing crop-conditioned nutrient sensitivity: humidity and rainfall emerge as the most influential features globally, while crop-specific profiles diverge meaningfully rainfall dominates rice, nitrogen and potassium dominate maize, and humidity and nitrogen dominate coffee. These explanations provide transparency into model decisions and surface both agronomically consistent patterns and dataset-specific divergences worth further study. Together, these contributions establish AgroSense~2.0 as a more principled, interpretable, and geospatially grounded framework for precision agriculture.

  • 3 authors
·
Jun 19

Pushing the Frontier of Black-Box LVLM Attacks via Fine-Grained Detail Targeting

Black-box adversarial attacks on Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) are challenging due to missing gradients and complex multimodal boundaries. While prior state-of-the-art transfer-based approaches like M-Attack perform well using local crop-level matching between source and target images, we find this induces high-variance, nearly orthogonal gradients across iterations, violating coherent local alignment and destabilizing optimization. We attribute this to (i) ViT translation sensitivity that yields spike-like gradients and (ii) structural asymmetry between source and target crops. We reformulate local matching as an asymmetric expectation over source transformations and target semantics, and build a gradient-denoising upgrade to M-Attack. On the source side, Multi-Crop Alignment (MCA) averages gradients from multiple independently sampled local views per iteration to reduce variance. On the target side, Auxiliary Target Alignment (ATA) replaces aggressive target augmentation with a small auxiliary set from a semantically correlated distribution, producing a smoother, lower-variance target manifold. We further reinterpret momentum as Patch Momentum, replaying historical crop gradients; combined with a refined patch-size ensemble (PE+), this strengthens transferable directions. Together these modules form M-Attack-V2, a simple, modular enhancement over M-Attack that substantially improves transfer-based black-box attacks on frontier LVLMs: boosting success rates on Claude-4.0 from 8% to 30%, Gemini-2.5-Pro from 83% to 97%, and GPT-5 from 98% to 100%, outperforming prior black-box LVLM attacks. Code and data are publicly available at: https://github.com/vila-lab/M-Attack-V2.

  • 5 authors
·
Feb 19

DFYP: A Dynamic Fusion Framework with Spectral Channel Attention and Adaptive Operator learning for Crop Yield Prediction

Accurate remote sensing-based crop yield prediction remains a fundamental challenging task due to complex spatial patterns, heterogeneous spectral characteristics, and dynamic agricultural conditions. Existing methods often suffer from limited spatial modeling capacity, weak generalization across crop types and years. To address these challenges, we propose DFYP, a novel Dynamic Fusion framework for crop Yield Prediction, which combines spectral channel attention, edge-adaptive spatial modeling and a learnable fusion mechanism to improve robustness across diverse agricultural scenarios. Specifically, DFYP introduces three key components: (1) a Resolution-aware Channel Attention (RCA) module that enhances spectral representation by adaptively reweighting input channels based on resolution-specific characteristics; (2) an Adaptive Operator Learning Network (AOL-Net) that dynamically selects operators for convolutional kernels to improve edge-sensitive spatial feature extraction under varying crop and temporal conditions; and (3) a dual-branch architecture with a learnable fusion mechanism, which jointly models local spatial details and global contextual information to support cross-resolution and cross-crop generalization. Extensive experiments on multi-year datasets MODIS and multi-crop dataset Sentinel-2 demonstrate that DFYP consistently outperforms current state-of-the-art baselines in RMSE, MAE, and R2 across different spatial resolutions, crop types, and time periods, showcasing its effectiveness and robustness for real-world agricultural monitoring.

  • 5 authors
·
Jul 8, 2025

Deep Learning for automated multi-scale functional field boundaries extraction using multi-date Sentinel-2 and PlanetScope imagery: Case Study of Netherlands and Pakistan

This study explores the effectiveness of multi-temporal satellite imagery for better functional field boundary delineation using deep learning semantic segmentation architecture on two distinct geographical and multi-scale farming systems of Netherlands and Pakistan. Multidate images of April, August and October 2022 were acquired for PlanetScope and Sentinel-2 in sub regions of Netherlands and November 2022, February and March 2023 for selected area of Dunyapur in Pakistan. For Netherlands, Basic registration crop parcels (BRP) vector layer was used as labeled training data. while self-crafted field boundary vector data were utilized for Pakistan. Four deep learning models with UNET architecture were evaluated using different combinations of multi-date images and NDVI stacks in the Netherlands subregions. A comparative analysis of IoU scores assessed the effectiveness of the proposed multi-date NDVI stack approach. These findings were then applied for transfer learning, using pre-trained models from the Netherlands on the selected area in Pakistan. Additionally, separate models were trained using self-crafted field boundary data for Pakistan, and combined models were developed using data from both the Netherlands and Pakistan. Results indicate that multi-date NDVI stacks provide additional temporal context, reflecting crop growth over different times of the season. The study underscores the critical role of multi-scale ground information from diverse geographical areas in developing robust and universally applicable models for field boundary delineation. The results also highlight the importance of fine spatial resolution for extraction of field boundaries in regions with small scale framing. The findings can be extended to multi-scale implementations for improved automatic field boundary delineation in heterogeneous agricultural environments.

  • 4 authors
·
Nov 24, 2024

LLaVA-SP: Enhancing Visual Representation with Visual Spatial Tokens for MLLMs

The architecture of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) commonly connects a vision encoder, often based on CLIP-ViT, to a large language model. While CLIP-ViT works well for capturing global image features, it struggles to model local relationships between adjacent patches, leading to weaker visual representation, which in turn affects the detailed understanding ability of MLLMs. To solve this, we propose LLaVA-SP, which only adds six spatial visual tokens to the original visual tokens to enhance the visual representation. Our approach offers three key advantages: 1)We propose a novel Projector, which uses convolutional kernels to derive visual spatial tokens from ViT patch features, simulating two visual spatial ordering approaches: ``from central region to global" and ``from abstract to specific". Then, a cross-attention mechanism is applied to fuse fine-grained visual information, enriching the overall visual representation. 2) We present two model variants: LLaVA-SP-Cropping, which focuses on detail features through progressive cropping, and LLaVA-SP-Pooling, which captures global semantics through adaptive pooling, enabling the model to handle diverse visual understanding tasks. 3) Extensive experiments show that LLaVA-SP, fine-tuned with LoRA, achieves significant performance improvements across various multimodal benchmarks, outperforming the state-of-the-art LLaVA-1.5 model in multiple tasks with nearly identical inference latency. The code and models are available at https://github.com/CnFaker/LLaVA-SP.

  • 5 authors
·
Jul 1, 2025

AgroOmni: A Large-Scale Multi-view Agricultural Dataset for Cross-Scale Multimodal Reasoning

Modern agricultural data is sourced from diverse platforms and spans multiple spatial scales, ranging from ground-level close-up photography to Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) aerial observation and satellite remote sensing imagery. Accordingly, agricultural multimodal reasoning demands robust cross-scale spatial understanding. However, due to the lack of multi-view agricultural benchmark datasets, existing multimodal large language models (MLLMs) exhibit severe ground-level bias, which leads to scale confusion then semantic collapse in agricultural perception tasks, such as misinterpreting farmland imagery as walls or floors. To address this, we introduce AgroOmni, a large-scale multi-view training corpus with 288K Visual Question Answering pairs covering 56 specialized task categories across 14 task types, designed to capture diverse scales in modern precision agriculture. Built on this dataset, we propose AgroNVILA, which achieves a new state-of-the-art of 62.32% on the AgroMind benchmark (+15.03% over GPT-5.2), effectively mitigating the multi-view cross-scale gap for holistic agricultural understanding. Diagnostic evaluations on AgMMU further reveal an inherent heterogeneity between macro-priors and micro-diagnostics through constrained zero-shot performance. Meanwhile, even minimal fine-tuning leads to a dramatic performance gain of AgroNVILA on AgMMU, strongly demonstrating its generalization capability empowered by AgroOmni. Full training scripts are publicly available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/AgroOmni-6510.

  • 13 authors
·
Jun 7

Presenting an extensive lab- and field-image dataset of crops and weeds for computer vision tasks in agriculture

We present two large datasets of labelled plant-images that are suited towards the training of machine learning and computer vision models. The first dataset encompasses as the day of writing over 1.2 million images of indoor-grown crops and weeds common to the Canadian Prairies and many US states. The second dataset consists of over 540,000 images of plants imaged in farmland. All indoor plant images are labelled by species and we provide rich etadata on the level of individual images. This comprehensive database allows to filter the datasets under user-defined specifications such as for example the crop-type or the age of the plant. Furthermore, the indoor dataset contains images of plants taken from a wide variety of angles, including profile shots, top-down shots, and angled perspectives. The images taken from plants in fields are all from a top-down perspective and contain usually multiple plants per image. For these images metadata is also available. In this paper we describe both datasets' characteristics with respect to plant variety, plant age, and number of images. We further introduce an open-access sample of the indoor-dataset that contains 1,000 images of each species covered in our dataset. These, in total 14,000 images, had been selected, such that they form a representative sample with respect to plant age and ndividual plants per species. This sample serves as a quick entry point for new users to the dataset, allowing them to explore the data on a small scale and find the parameters of data most useful for their application without having to deal with hundreds of thousands of individual images.

  • 6 authors
·
Aug 12, 2021

GrowliFlower: An image time series dataset for GROWth analysis of cauLIFLOWER

This article presents GrowliFlower, a georeferenced, image-based UAV time series dataset of two monitored cauliflower fields of size 0.39 and 0.60 ha acquired in 2020 and 2021. The dataset contains RGB and multispectral orthophotos from which about 14,000 individual plant coordinates are derived and provided. The coordinates enable the dataset users the extraction of complete and incomplete time series of image patches showing individual plants. The dataset contains collected phenotypic traits of 740 plants, including the developmental stage as well as plant and cauliflower size. As the harvestable product is completely covered by leaves, plant IDs and coordinates are provided to extract image pairs of plants pre and post defoliation, to facilitate estimations of cauliflower head size. Moreover, the dataset contains pixel-accurate leaf and plant instance segmentations, as well as stem annotations to address tasks like classification, detection, segmentation, instance segmentation, and similar computer vision tasks. The dataset aims to foster the development and evaluation of machine learning approaches. It specifically focuses on the analysis of growth and development of cauliflower and the derivation of phenotypic traits to foster the development of automation in agriculture. Two baseline results of instance segmentation at plant and leaf level based on the labeled instance segmentation data are presented. The entire data set is publicly available.

  • 9 authors
·
Apr 1, 2022

Global Rice Multi-Class Segmentation Dataset (RiceSEG): A Comprehensive and Diverse High-Resolution RGB-Annotated Images for the Development and Benchmarking of Rice Segmentation Algorithms

Developing computer vision-based rice phenotyping techniques is crucial for precision field management and accelerating breeding, thereby continuously advancing rice production. Among phenotyping tasks, distinguishing image components is a key prerequisite for characterizing plant growth and development at the organ scale, enabling deeper insights into eco-physiological processes. However, due to the fine structure of rice organs and complex illumination within the canopy, this task remains highly challenging, underscoring the need for a high-quality training dataset. Such datasets are scarce, both due to a lack of large, representative collections of rice field images and the time-intensive nature of annotation. To address this gap, we established the first comprehensive multi-class rice semantic segmentation dataset, RiceSEG. We gathered nearly 50,000 high-resolution, ground-based images from five major rice-growing countries (China, Japan, India, the Philippines, and Tanzania), encompassing over 6,000 genotypes across all growth stages. From these original images, 3,078 representative samples were selected and annotated with six classes (background, green vegetation, senescent vegetation, panicle, weeds, and duckweed) to form the RiceSEG dataset. Notably, the sub-dataset from China spans all major genotypes and rice-growing environments from the northeast to the south. Both state-of-the-art convolutional neural networks and transformer-based semantic segmentation models were used as baselines. While these models perform reasonably well in segmenting background and green vegetation, they face difficulties during the reproductive stage, when canopy structures are more complex and multiple classes are involved. These findings highlight the importance of our dataset for developing specialized segmentation models for rice and other crops.

  • 24 authors
·
Apr 2, 2025

Tackling fluffy clouds: robust agricultural field boundary delineation from Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 satellite image time series

Accurate delineation of agricultural field boundaries is essential for effective crop monitoring and resource management. However, competing methodologies often face significant challenges, particularly in their reliance on extensive manual efforts for cloud-free data curation and limited adaptability to diverse global conditions. In this paper, we introduce PTAViT3D, a deep learning architecture specifically designed for processing three-dimensional time series of satellite imagery from either Sentinel-1 (S1) or Sentinel-2 (S2). Additionally, we present PTAViT3D-CA, an extension of the PTAViT3D model incorporating cross-attention mechanisms to fuse S1 and S2 datasets, enhancing robustness in cloud-contaminated scenarios. The proposed methods leverage spatio-temporal correlations through a memory-efficient 3D Vision Transformer architecture, facilitating accurate boundary delineation directly from preprocessed, cloud-affected imagery. We comprehensively validate our models through extensive testing on various datasets, including Australia's ePaddocks - CSIRO's national, continental-scale agricultural field boundary product covering Australia's cropping regions - alongside public benchmarks Fields-of-the-World, PASTIS, and AI4SmallFarms. Our results consistently demonstrate state-of-the-art performance, highlighting excellent global transferability and robustness. Crucially, our approach significantly simplifies data preparation workflows by reliably processing cloud-affected imagery, thereby offering strong adaptability across diverse agricultural environments. Our code and models are publicly available at https://github.com/feevos/tfcl.

  • 16 authors
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Sep 22 1

Beyond Image Borders: Learning Feature Extrapolation for Unbounded Image Composition

For improving image composition and aesthetic quality, most existing methods modulate the captured images by striking out redundant content near the image borders. However, such image cropping methods are limited in the range of image views. Some methods have been suggested to extrapolate the images and predict cropping boxes from the extrapolated image. Nonetheless, the synthesized extrapolated regions may be included in the cropped image, making the image composition result not real and potentially with degraded image quality. In this paper, we circumvent this issue by presenting a joint framework for both unbounded recommendation of camera view and image composition (i.e., UNIC). In this way, the cropped image is a sub-image of the image acquired by the predicted camera view, and thus can be guaranteed to be real and consistent in image quality. Specifically, our framework takes the current camera preview frame as input and provides a recommendation for view adjustment, which contains operations unlimited by the image borders, such as zooming in or out and camera movement. To improve the prediction accuracy of view adjustment prediction, we further extend the field of view by feature extrapolation. After one or several times of view adjustments, our method converges and results in both a camera view and a bounding box showing the image composition recommendation. Extensive experiments are conducted on the datasets constructed upon existing image cropping datasets, showing the effectiveness of our UNIC in unbounded recommendation of camera view and image composition. The source code, dataset, and pretrained models is available at https://github.com/liuxiaoyu1104/UNIC.

  • 7 authors
·
Sep 21, 2023

A Multimodal Benchmark Dataset and Model for Crop Disease Diagnosis

While conversational generative AI has shown considerable potential in enhancing decision-making for agricultural professionals, its exploration has predominantly been anchored in text-based interactions. The evolution of multimodal conversational AI, leveraging vast amounts of image-text data from diverse sources, marks a significant stride forward. However, the application of such advanced vision-language models in the agricultural domain, particularly for crop disease diagnosis, remains underexplored. In this work, we present the crop disease domain multimodal (CDDM) dataset, a pioneering resource designed to advance the field of agricultural research through the application of multimodal learning techniques. The dataset comprises 137,000 images of various crop diseases, accompanied by 1 million question-answer pairs that span a broad spectrum of agricultural knowledge, from disease identification to management practices. By integrating visual and textual data, CDDM facilitates the development of sophisticated question-answering systems capable of providing precise, useful advice to farmers and agricultural professionals. We demonstrate the utility of the dataset by finetuning state-of-the-art multimodal models, showcasing significant improvements in crop disease diagnosis. Specifically, we employed a novel finetuning strategy that utilizes low-rank adaptation (LoRA) to finetune the visual encoder, adapter and language model simultaneously. Our contributions include not only the dataset but also a finetuning strategy and a benchmark to stimulate further research in agricultural technology, aiming to bridge the gap between advanced AI techniques and practical agricultural applications. The dataset is available at https: //github.com/UnicomAI/UnicomBenchmark/tree/main/CDDMBench.

  • 7 authors
·
Mar 10, 2025

WeedSense: Multi-Task Learning for Weed Segmentation, Height Estimation, and Growth Stage Classification

Weed management represents a critical challenge in agriculture, significantly impacting crop yields and requiring substantial resources for control. Effective weed monitoring and analysis strategies are crucial for implementing sustainable agricultural practices and site-specific management approaches. We introduce WeedSense, a novel multi-task learning architecture for comprehensive weed analysis that jointly performs semantic segmentation, height estimation, and growth stage classification. We present a unique dataset capturing 16 weed species over an 11-week growth cycle with pixel-level annotations, height measurements, and temporal labels. WeedSense leverages a dual-path encoder incorporating Universal Inverted Bottleneck blocks and a Multi-Task Bifurcated Decoder with transformer-based feature fusion to generate multi-scale features and enable simultaneous prediction across multiple tasks. WeedSense outperforms other state-of-the-art models on our comprehensive evaluation. On our multi-task dataset, WeedSense achieves mIoU of 89.78% for segmentation, 1.67cm MAE for height estimation, and 99.99% accuracy for growth stage classification while maintaining real-time inference at 160 FPS. Our multitask approach achieves 3times faster inference than sequential single-task execution and uses 32.4% fewer parameters. Please see our project page at weedsense.github.io.

baselab BASE Lab @ SIUC
·
Aug 20, 2025

Zero-Shot Multi-Spectral Learning: Reimagining a Generalist Multimodal Gemini 2.5 Model for Remote Sensing Applications

Multi-spectral imagery plays a crucial role in diverse Remote Sensing applications including land-use classification, environmental monitoring and urban planning. These images are widely adopted because their additional spectral bands correlate strongly with physical materials on the ground, such as ice, water, and vegetation. This allows for more accurate identification, and their public availability from missions, such as Sentinel-2 and Landsat, only adds to their value. Currently, the automatic analysis of such data is predominantly managed through machine learning models specifically trained for multi-spectral input, which are costly to train and support. Furthermore, although providing a lot of utility for Remote Sensing, such additional inputs cannot be used with powerful generalist large multimodal models, which are capable of solving many visual problems, but are not able to understand specialized multi-spectral signals. To address this, we propose a training-free approach which introduces new multi-spectral data in a Zero-Shot-only mode, as inputs to generalist multimodal models, trained on RGB-only inputs. Our approach leverages the multimodal models' understanding of the visual space, and proposes to adapt to inputs to that space, and to inject domain-specific information as instructions into the model. We exemplify this idea with the Gemini2.5 model and observe strong Zero-Shot performance gains of the approach on popular Remote Sensing benchmarks for land cover and land use classification and demonstrate the easy adaptability of Gemini2.5 to new inputs. These results highlight the potential for geospatial professionals, working with non-standard specialized inputs, to easily leverage powerful multimodal models, such as Gemini2.5, to accelerate their work, benefiting from their rich reasoning and contextual capabilities, grounded in the specialized sensor data.

  • 7 authors
·
Sep 23, 2025 2

RowDetr: End-to-End Row Detection Using Polynomials

Crop row detection is essential for enabling autonomous navigation in GPS-denied environments, such as under-canopy agricultural settings. Traditional methods often struggle with occlusions, variable lighting conditions, and the structural variability of crop rows. To address these challenges, RowDetr, a novel end-to-end neural network architecture, is introduced for robust and efficient row detection. A new dataset of approximately 6,900 images is curated, capturing a diverse range of real-world agricultural conditions, including occluded rows, uneven terrain, and varying crop densities. Unlike previous approaches, RowDetr leverages smooth polynomial functions to precisely delineate crop boundaries in the image space, ensuring a more structured and interpretable representation of row geometry. A key innovation of this approach is PolyOptLoss, a novel energy-based loss function designed to enhance learning robustness, even in the presence of noisy or imperfect labels. This loss function significantly improves model stability and generalization by optimizing polynomial curve fitting directly in image space. Extensive experiments demonstrate that RowDetr significantly outperforms existing frameworks, including Agronav and RowColAttention, across key performance metrics. Additionally, RowDetr achieves a sixfold speedup over Agronav, making it highly suitable for real-time deployment on resource-constrained edge devices. To facilitate better comparisons across future studies, lane detection metrics from autonomous driving research are adapted, providing a more standardized and meaningful evaluation framework for crop row detection. This work establishes a new benchmark in under-canopy

  • 2 authors
·
Dec 13, 2024 1

Maize Seedling Detection Dataset (MSDD): A Curated High-Resolution RGB Dataset for Seedling Maize Detection and Benchmarking with YOLOv9, YOLO11, YOLOv12 and Faster-RCNN

Accurate maize seedling detection is crucial for precision agriculture, yet curated datasets remain scarce. We introduce MSDD, a high-quality aerial image dataset for maize seedling stand counting, with applications in early-season crop monitoring, yield prediction, and in-field management. Stand counting determines how many plants germinated, guiding timely decisions such as replanting or adjusting inputs. Traditional methods are labor-intensive and error-prone, while computer vision enables efficient, accurate detection. MSDD contains three classes-single, double, and triple plants-capturing diverse growth stages, planting setups, soil types, lighting conditions, camera angles, and densities, ensuring robustness for real-world use. Benchmarking shows detection is most reliable during V4-V6 stages and under nadir views. Among tested models, YOLO11 is fastest, while YOLOv9 yields the highest accuracy for single plants. Single plant detection achieves precision up to 0.984 and recall up to 0.873, but detecting doubles and triples remains difficult due to rarity and irregular appearance, often from planting errors. Class imbalance further reduces accuracy in multi-plant detection. Despite these challenges, YOLO11 maintains efficient inference at 35 ms per image, with an additional 120 ms for saving outputs. MSDD establishes a strong foundation for developing models that enhance stand counting, optimize resource allocation, and support real-time decision-making. This dataset marks a step toward automating agricultural monitoring and advancing precision agriculture.

  • 2 authors
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Sep 17, 2025

iNatAg: Multi-Class Classification Models Enabled by a Large-Scale Benchmark Dataset with 4.7M Images of 2,959 Crop and Weed Species

Accurate identification of crop and weed species is critical for precision agriculture and sustainable farming. However, it remains a challenging task due to a variety of factors -- a high degree of visual similarity among species, environmental variability, and a continued lack of large, agriculture-specific image data. We introduce iNatAg, a large-scale image dataset which contains over 4.7 million images of 2,959 distinct crop and weed species, with precise annotations along the taxonomic hierarchy from binary crop/weed labels to specific species labels. Curated from the broader iNaturalist database, iNatAg contains data from every continent and accurately reflects the variability of natural image captures and environments. Enabled by this data, we train benchmark models built upon the Swin Transformer architecture and evaluate the impact of various modifications such as the incorporation of geospatial data and LoRA finetuning. Our best models achieve state-of-the-art performance across all taxonomic classification tasks, achieving 92.38\% on crop and weed classification. Furthermore, the scale of our dataset enables us to explore incorrect misclassifications and unlock new analytic possiblities for plant species. By combining large-scale species coverage, multi-task labels, and geographic diversity, iNatAg provides a new foundation for building robust, geolocation-aware agricultural classification systems. We release the iNatAg dataset publicly through AgML (https://github.com/Project-AgML/AgML), enabling direct access and integration into agricultural machine learning workflows.

  • 3 authors
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Mar 25, 2025

Visual Funnel: Resolving Contextual Blindness in Multimodal Large Language Models

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) demonstrate impressive reasoning capabilities, but often fail to perceive fine-grained visual details, limiting their applicability in precision-demanding tasks. While methods that crop salient regions of an image offer a partial solution, we identify a critical limitation they introduce: "Contextual Blindness". This failure occurs due to structural disconnect between high-fidelity details (from the crop) and the broader global context (from the original image), even when all necessary visual information is present. We argue that this limitation stems not from a lack of information 'Quantity', but from a lack of 'Structural Diversity' in the model's input. To resolve this, we propose Visual Funnel, a training-free, two-step approach. Visual Funnel first performs Contextual Anchoring to identify the region of interest in a single forward pass. It then constructs an Entropy-Scaled Portfolio that preserves the hierarchical context - ranging from focal detail to broader surroundings - by dynamically determining crop sizes based on attention entropy and refining crop centers. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that Visual Funnel significantly outperforms naive single-crop and unstructured multi-crop baselines. Our results further validate that simply adding more unstructured crops provides limited or even detrimental benefits, confirming that the hierarchical structure of our portfolio is key to resolving Contextual Blindness.

  • 5 authors
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Dec 11, 2025

UAV3DCrop: Benchmarking 3D Reconstruction in Repeated Multi-Angle UAV Crop Surveys

Accurate 3D crop monitoring underpins data-driven precision agriculture by enabling field-scale analysis of plant structure, growth dynamics, and management response. Modern 3D reconstruction methods perform strongly on generic benchmarks, but rendered appearance may not translate into metrically and agronomically useful geometry in crop fields. We introduce UAV3DCrop, a public benchmark of repeated multi-angle unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) crop surveys. It contains 88,830 RGB images at 5280 times 3956 pixels, with a ground sampling distance of 3.6-5.8 mm, from 91 scenes spanning corn, soybean, wheat, and oat. Track A evaluates seven scene-optimized methods -- Neural Radiance Field (NeRF) and 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) variants -- on held-out views, photogrammetry-referenced depth, and canopy-height recovery. Track B tests four pretrained feed-forward models on zero-shot camera-pose and geometry estimation. The scene-optimized methods rank differently across the three targets: Splatfacto-big leads appearance, whereas Scaffold-GS leads depth and is statistically tied with Splatfacto for canopy height. Among feed-forward models, MapAnything leads on seven of the eight metrics, while the remaining models vary more across crops and fail severely on absolute scale in a way that alignment conceals. Repeated acquisitions reveal further sensitivities that differ by output type and by model, associated with position within the acquisition sequence and with tie-point multiplicity. Current 3D reconstruction methods are therefore not yet interchangeable for agronomic use: no single method wins on appearance, geometry, and canopy height at once, and only one of four feed-forward models recovers usable metric scale. The dataset is publicly available at https://link-dev.github.io/UAV3DCrop/

  • 14 authors
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Aug 2

The Earth in One Gaze: Training-Free Active Focus for UHR Remote Sensing Understanding

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) must balance local detail against scene context when interpreting ultra-high-resolution (UHR) remote sensing (RS) imagery within a limited visual-input budget. Existing selection-based methods either prune tokens and select patches through relevance scoring, or crop actively through repeated inspection. Neither strategy directly redistributes pixels within a continuous full-scene view: the first retains selected tokens or patches, and the second re-encodes a crop detached from its surroundings. Our pilot study finds that a frozen MLLM already produces useful question-guided spatial requests, yet crop-based inspection of the selected regions does not consistently improve its answers. We therefore formulate UHR understanding as a question of where to spend a fixed pixel budget. Based on this, we introduce GazeEarth, a simple-yet-effective training-free framework that couples question-guided region selection with full-scene foveated observation. The MLLM selects evidence cells from an indexed overview; a deterministic, topology-preserving warp resamples the original image onto a fixed-size canvas, enlarging their shared neighborhood while compressing the periphery; the same frozen model answers from this focused view, using at most two MLLM calls and no external selector or iterative search. Across three UHR remote sensing benchmarks and four frozen backbones, GazeEarth improves benchmark-averaged accuracy by 4.6 to 9.4 percentage points over direct answering and 3.4 to 4.3 over overview answering, outperforming task-trained methods. Our analyses show that existing MLLMs can guide where to look in UHR images on their own, and that what they can infer from the selected evidence depends on how that evidence is presented.

  • 8 authors
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Sep 22

Segmentation and Tracking of Vegetable Plants by Exploiting Vegetable Shape Feature for Precision Spray of Agricultural Robots

With the increasing deployment of agricultural robots, the traditional manual spray of liquid fertilizer and pesticide is gradually being replaced by agricultural robots. For robotic precision spray application in vegetable farms, accurate plant phenotyping through instance segmentation and robust plant tracking are of great importance and a prerequisite for the following spray action. Regarding the robust tracking of vegetable plants, to solve the challenging problem of associating vegetables with similar color and texture in consecutive images, in this paper, a novel method of Multiple Object Tracking and Segmentation (MOTS) is proposed for instance segmentation and tracking of multiple vegetable plants. In our approach, contour and blob features are extracted to describe unique feature of each individual vegetable, and associate the same vegetables in different images. By assigning a unique ID for each vegetable, it ensures the robot to spray each vegetable exactly once, while traversing along the farm rows. Comprehensive experiments including ablation studies are conducted, which prove its superior performance over two State-Of-The-Art (SOTA) MOTS methods. Compared to the conventional MOTS methods, the proposed method is able to re-identify objects which have gone out of the camera field of view and re-appear again using the proposed data association strategy, which is important to ensure each vegetable be sprayed only once when the robot travels back and forth. Although the method is tested on lettuce farm, it can be applied to other similar vegetables such as broccoli and canola. Both code and the dataset of this paper is publicly released for the benefit of the community: https://github.com/NanH5837/LettuceMOTS.

  • 8 authors
·
Jun 25, 2023

Grape detection, segmentation and tracking using deep neural networks and three-dimensional association

Agricultural applications such as yield prediction, precision agriculture and automated harvesting need systems able to infer the crop state from low-cost sensing devices. Proximal sensing using affordable cameras combined with computer vision has seen a promising alternative, strengthened after the advent of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) as an alternative for challenging pattern recognition problems in natural images. Considering fruit growing monitoring and automation, a fundamental problem is the detection, segmentation and counting of individual fruits in orchards. Here we show that for wine grapes, a crop presenting large variability in shape, color, size and compactness, grape clusters can be successfully detected, segmented and tracked using state-of-the-art CNNs. In a test set containing 408 grape clusters from images taken on a trellis-system based vineyard, we have reached an F 1 -score up to 0.91 for instance segmentation, a fine separation of each cluster from other structures in the image that allows a more accurate assessment of fruit size and shape. We have also shown as clusters can be identified and tracked along video sequences recording orchard rows. We also present a public dataset containing grape clusters properly annotated in 300 images and a novel annotation methodology for segmentation of complex objects in natural images. The presented pipeline for annotation, training, evaluation and tracking of agricultural patterns in images can be replicated for different crops and production systems. It can be employed in the development of sensing components for several agricultural and environmental applications.

  • 4 authors
·
Jul 26, 2019

Learning to Look Again: Loss-Gap Supervision for Free-form Crop Routing in Vision-Language Models

Vision-language models (VLMs) fail many detail-centric questions for a concrete reason: the answer is visible in the image, yet lost after the image is compressed into a low-resolution global view. Allocating more visual tokens to every query improves some OCR and document cases, but it spends computation indiscriminately and can disturb tasks that rely on global context. We propose GapSight, a framework for learning visual re-reading: a VLM first takes a global glance, then selectively returns to a free-form region when the question calls for local evidence. The supervision comes from the target model's own failure signal. Offline, we compare answer loss or multiple-choice option margin under a global-only view and candidate crop-augmented views; crops that improve the target answer become model-specific review labels. A lightweight free-form crop router distills these labels into a one-shot inference policy that predicts whether to review, expected utility, and a continuous crop box from the global state. Across LLaVA-1.5-7B, InternVL2.5-8B, and Qwen2-VL-2B-Instruct, GapSight improves the Base no-zoom baseline on six benchmarks spanning OCR, documents, charts, infographics, VStarBench, and MME-RealWorld-Lite. On InternVL2.5-8B, GapSight raises the six-benchmark average from 52.25 to 64.29, above CropVLM (57.16), ViCrop (55.84), and ZoomRefine (54.43). Mechanism analyses show that the router rescues concrete wrong answers, adapts its action rate by task, and forms a favorable token-performance profile. These results position loss-gap supervision as a practical route to teaching VLMs when and where to look again.

  • 6 authors
·
Aug 21

Enhancing Few-Shot Image Classification through Learnable Multi-Scale Embedding and Attention Mechanisms

In the context of few-shot classification, the goal is to train a classifier using a limited number of samples while maintaining satisfactory performance. However, traditional metric-based methods exhibit certain limitations in achieving this objective. These methods typically rely on a single distance value between the query feature and support feature, thereby overlooking the contribution of shallow features. To overcome this challenge, we propose a novel approach in this paper. Our approach involves utilizing a multi-output embedding network that maps samples into distinct feature spaces. The proposed method extracts feature vectors at different stages, enabling the model to capture both global and abstract features. By utilizing these diverse feature spaces, our model enhances its performance. Moreover, employing a self-attention mechanism improves the refinement of features at each stage, leading to even more robust representations and improved overall performance. Furthermore, assigning learnable weights to each stage significantly improved performance and results. We conducted comprehensive evaluations on the MiniImageNet and FC100 datasets, specifically in the 5-way 1-shot and 5-way 5-shot scenarios. Additionally, we performed cross-domain tasks across eight benchmark datasets, achieving high accuracy in the testing domains. These evaluations demonstrate the efficacy of our proposed method in comparison to state-of-the-art approaches. https://github.com/FatemehAskari/MSENet

  • 3 authors
·
Sep 12, 2024

AgroGround: Multi-Granularity Grounded Recognition in Agriculture

Agricultural visual models are typically evaluated for either recognition or localization, but reliable diagnosis requires identifying what is present and localizing the evidence. Agricultural visual question answering (VQA) datasets carry rich semantic labels but rarely link them to image regions, and adding such annotations by hand is costly at scale. We introduce AgroGround, a large-scale dataset for grounded agricultural recognition: identifying plant diseases and other agricultural targets and localizing their image regions. An automated pipeline converts the labels of eight agricultural VQA datasets into annotations for disease lesions and whole objects, producing 794,850 instruction examples. Healthy images provide negative supervision for disease queries, teaching the model to return empty predictions. We fine-tune a shared vision-language model on known-target grounding instructions combined with instructions requiring both recognition and localization. We evaluate predicted identities, regions, joint correctness, and healthy-image abstention on 1,480 human-verified images disjoint from all training data. Grounding-only fine-tuning reduces recognition accuracy from 51.8\% to 29.1\%, while adding recognition-and-localization instructions raises it to 72.6\%. With images and annotations held fixed, combining the two formats raises joint accuracy from 19.2\% to 43.3\% at comparable grounding. Healthy negatives raise abstention on healthy images to 95.0\%, and reinforcement learning improves lesion-level grounding. The resulting 2B model exceeds its annotation teacher in grounding F1 on our benchmark and on the external PlantSeg test set. AgroGround establishes a benchmark for grounded agricultural recognition, measuring joint correctness of identity and localization along with abstention on healthy images. The code is available at https://github.com/AB-Abdulla/AgroGround.

  • 3 authors
·
Oct 2

Lost in Translation: Modern Neural Networks Still Struggle With Small Realistic Image Transformations

Deep neural networks that achieve remarkable performance in image classification have previously been shown to be easily fooled by tiny transformations such as a one pixel translation of the input image. In order to address this problem, two approaches have been proposed in recent years. The first approach suggests using huge datasets together with data augmentation in the hope that a highly varied training set will teach the network to learn to be invariant. The second approach suggests using architectural modifications based on sampling theory to deal explicitly with image translations. In this paper, we show that these approaches still fall short in robustly handling 'natural' image translations that simulate a subtle change in camera orientation. Our findings reveal that a mere one-pixel translation can result in a significant change in the predicted image representation for approximately 40% of the test images in state-of-the-art models (e.g. open-CLIP trained on LAION-2B or DINO-v2) , while models that are explicitly constructed to be robust to cyclic translations can still be fooled with 1 pixel realistic (non-cyclic) translations 11% of the time. We present Robust Inference by Crop Selection: a simple method that can be proven to achieve any desired level of consistency, although with a modest tradeoff with the model's accuracy. Importantly, we demonstrate how employing this method reduces the ability to fool state-of-the-art models with a 1 pixel translation to less than 5% while suffering from only a 1% drop in classification accuracy. Additionally, we show that our method can be easy adjusted to deal with circular shifts as well. In such case we achieve 100% robustness to integer shifts with state-of-the-art accuracy, and with no need for any further training.

  • 2 authors
·
Apr 10, 2024

Remote Sensing Image Segmentation Using Vision Mamba and Multi-Scale Multi-Frequency Feature Fusion

As remote sensing imaging technology continues to advance and evolve, processing high-resolution and diversified satellite imagery to improve segmentation accuracy and enhance interpretation efficiency emerg as a pivotal area of investigation within the realm of remote sensing. Although segmentation algorithms based on CNNs and Transformers achieve significant progress in performance, balancing segmentation accuracy and computational complexity remains challenging, limiting their wide application in practical tasks. To address this, this paper introduces state space model (SSM) and proposes a novel hybrid semantic segmentation network based on vision Mamba (CVMH-UNet). This method designs a cross-scanning visual state space block (CVSSBlock) that uses cross 2D scanning (CS2D) to fully capture global information from multiple directions, while by incorporating convolutional neural network branches to overcome the constraints of Vision Mamba (VMamba) in acquiring local information, this approach facilitates a comprehensive analysis of both global and local features. Furthermore, to address the issue of limited discriminative power and the difficulty in achieving detailed fusion with direct skip connections, a multi-frequency multi-scale feature fusion block (MFMSBlock) is designed. This module introduces multi-frequency information through 2D discrete cosine transform (2D DCT) to enhance information utilization and provides additional scale local detail information through point-wise convolution branches. Finally, it aggregates multi-scale information along the channel dimension, achieving refined feature fusion. Findings from experiments conducted on renowned datasets of remote sensing imagery demonstrate that proposed CVMH-UNet achieves superior segmentation performance while maintaining low computational complexity, outperforming surpassing current leading-edge segmentation algorithms.

  • 7 authors
·
Oct 7, 2024

LeafNet: A Large-Scale Dataset and Comprehensive Benchmark for Foundational Vision-Language Understanding of Plant Diseases

Foundation models and vision-language pre-training have significantly advanced Vision-Language Models (VLMs), enabling multimodal processing of visual and linguistic data. However, their application in domain-specific agricultural tasks, such as plant pathology, remains limited due to the lack of large-scale, comprehensive multimodal image--text datasets and benchmarks. To address this gap, we introduce LeafNet, a comprehensive multimodal dataset, and LeafBench, a visual question-answering benchmark developed to systematically evaluate the capabilities of VLMs in understanding plant diseases. The dataset comprises 186,000 leaf digital images spanning 97 disease classes, paired with metadata, generating 13,950 question-answer pairs spanning six critical agricultural tasks. The questions assess various aspects of plant pathology understanding, including visual symptom recognition, taxonomic relationships, and diagnostic reasoning. Benchmarking 12 state-of-the-art VLMs on our LeafBench dataset, we reveal substantial disparity in their disease understanding capabilities. Our study shows performance varies markedly across tasks: binary healthy--diseased classification exceeds 90% accuracy, while fine-grained pathogen and species identification remains below 65%. Direct comparison between vision-only models and VLMs demonstrates the critical advantage of multimodal architectures: fine-tuned VLMs outperform traditional vision models, confirming that integrating linguistic representations significantly enhances diagnostic precision. These findings highlight critical gaps in current VLMs for plant pathology applications and underscore the need for LeafBench as a rigorous framework for methodological advancement and progress evaluation toward reliable AI-assisted plant disease diagnosis. Code is available at https://github.com/EnalisUs/LeafBench.

  • 3 authors
·
Feb 14

Self-Consistency in Vision-Language Models for Precision Agriculture: Multi-Response Consensus for Crop Disease Management

Precision agriculture relies heavily on accurate image analysis for crop disease identification and treatment recommendation, yet existing vision-language models (VLMs) often underperform in specialized agricultural domains. This work presents a domain-aware framework for agricultural image processing that combines prompt-based expert evaluation with self-consistency mechanisms to enhance VLM reliability in precision agriculture applications. We introduce two key innovations: (1) a prompt-based evaluation protocol that configures a language model as an expert plant pathologist for scalable assessment of image analysis outputs, and (2) a cosine-consistency self-voting mechanism that generates multiple candidate responses from agricultural images and selects the most semantically coherent diagnosis using domain-adapted embeddings. Applied to maize leaf disease identification from field images using a fine-tuned PaliGemma model, our approach improves diagnostic accuracy from 82.2\% to 87.8\%, symptom analysis from 38.9\% to 52.2\%, and treatment recommendation from 27.8\% to 43.3\% compared to standard greedy decoding. The system remains compact enough for deployment on mobile devices, supporting real-time agricultural decision-making in resource-constrained environments. These results demonstrate significant potential for AI-driven precision agriculture tools that can operate reliably in diverse field conditions.

  • 4 authors
·
Jul 8, 2025

Lightweight Image Super-Resolution with Information Multi-distillation Network

In recent years, single image super-resolution (SISR) methods using deep convolution neural network (CNN) have achieved impressive results. Thanks to the powerful representation capabilities of the deep networks, numerous previous ways can learn the complex non-linear mapping between low-resolution (LR) image patches and their high-resolution (HR) versions. However, excessive convolutions will limit the application of super-resolution technology in low computing power devices. Besides, super-resolution of any arbitrary scale factor is a critical issue in practical applications, which has not been well solved in the previous approaches. To address these issues, we propose a lightweight information multi-distillation network (IMDN) by constructing the cascaded information multi-distillation blocks (IMDB), which contains distillation and selective fusion parts. Specifically, the distillation module extracts hierarchical features step-by-step, and fusion module aggregates them according to the importance of candidate features, which is evaluated by the proposed contrast-aware channel attention mechanism. To process real images with any sizes, we develop an adaptive cropping strategy (ACS) to super-resolve block-wise image patches using the same well-trained model. Extensive experiments suggest that the proposed method performs favorably against the state-of-the-art SR algorithms in term of visual quality, memory footprint, and inference time. Code is available at https://github.com/Zheng222/IMDN.

  • 4 authors
·
Sep 25, 2019

Plant Disease Detection through Multimodal Large Language Models and Convolutional Neural Networks

Automation in agriculture plays a vital role in addressing challenges related to crop monitoring and disease management, particularly through early detection systems. This study investigates the effectiveness of combining multimodal Large Language Models (LLMs), specifically GPT-4o, with Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) for automated plant disease classification using leaf imagery. Leveraging the PlantVillage dataset, we systematically evaluate model performance across zero-shot, few-shot, and progressive fine-tuning scenarios. A comparative analysis between GPT-4o and the widely used ResNet-50 model was conducted across three resolutions (100, 150, and 256 pixels) and two plant species (apple and corn). Results indicate that fine-tuned GPT-4o models achieved slightly better performance compared to the performance of ResNet-50, achieving up to 98.12% classification accuracy on apple leaf images, compared to 96.88% achieved by ResNet-50, with improved generalization and near-zero training loss. However, zero-shot performance of GPT-4o was significantly lower, underscoring the need for minimal training. Additional evaluations on cross-resolution and cross-plant generalization revealed the models' adaptability and limitations when applied to new domains. The findings highlight the promise of integrating multimodal LLMs into automated disease detection pipelines, enhancing the scalability and intelligence of precision agriculture systems while reducing the dependence on large, labeled datasets and high-resolution sensor infrastructure. Large Language Models, Vision Language Models, LLMs and CNNs, Disease Detection with Vision Language Models, VLMs

  • 5 authors
·
Apr 29, 2025 1

Mini-Monkey: Multi-Scale Adaptive Cropping for Multimodal Large Language Models

Recently, there has been significant interest in enhancing the capability of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) to process high-resolution images. Most existing methods focus on adopting a cropping strategy to improve the ability of multimodal large language models to understand image details. However, this cropping operation inevitably causes the segmentation of objects and connected areas, which impairs the MLLM's ability to recognize small or irregularly shaped objects or text. This issue is particularly evident in lightweight MLLMs. Addressing this issue, we propose Mini-Monkey, a lightweight MLLM that incorporates a plug-and-play method called multi-scale adaptive crop strategy (MSAC). Mini-Monkey adaptively generates multi-scale representations, allowing it to select non-segmented objects from various scales. To mitigate the computational overhead introduced by MSAC, we propose a Scale Compression Mechanism (SCM), which effectively compresses image tokens. Mini-Monkey achieves state-of-the-art performance among 2B-parameter MLLMs. It not only demonstrates leading performance on a variety of general multimodal understanding tasks but also shows consistent improvements in document understanding capabilities. On the OCRBench, Mini-Monkey achieves a score of 802, outperforming 8B-parameter state-of-the-art model InternVL2-8B. Besides, our model and training strategy are very efficient, which can be trained with only eight RTX 3090. The code is available at https://github.com/Yuliang-Liu/Monkey.

  • 5 authors
·
Aug 4, 2024

StomaD2: An All-in-One System for Intelligent Stomatal Phenotype Analysis via Diffusion-Based Restoration Detection Network

Stomata play a crucial role in regulating plant physiological processes and reflecting environmental responses. However, accurate and high-throughput stomatal phenotyping remains challenging, as conventional approaches rely on destructive sampling and manual annotation, restricting large-scale and field deployment. To overcome these limitations, a noninvasive restoration-detection integrated framework, termed StomaD2, is developed to achieve accurate and fast stomatal phenotyping under complex imaging conditions. The framework incorporates a diffusion-based restoration module to recover degraded images and a specialized rotated object detection network tailored to the small, dense, and cluttered characteristics of stomata. The proposed network enhances feature representation through three key innovations: a column-wise structure for global feature interaction, context-aware resampling and reweighting mechanism to improve multi-scale consistency, and a feature reassembly module to boost discrimination against complex backgrounds. In extensive comparisons, StomaD2 demonstrated state-of-the-art performance. On public Maize and Wheat datasets, it achieved accuracies of 0.994 and 0.992, respectively, significantly outperforming existing benchmarks. When benchmarked against ten other advanced models, including Oriented Former and YOLOv12, StomaD2 achieved a top-tier F1-score/mAP of 0.989. The framework is integrated into a user-friendly, field-operable system that supports the fast extraction of eight stomatal phenotypes, such as density and conductance. Validated on more than 130 plant species, StomaD2's results highlight its strong generalizability and potential for large-scale phenotyping, plant physiology analysis, and precision agriculture applications.

Towards Efficient and Intelligent Laser Weeding: Method and Dataset for Weed Stem Detection

Weed control is a critical challenge in modern agriculture, as weeds compete with crops for essential nutrient resources, significantly reducing crop yield and quality. Traditional weed control methods, including chemical and mechanical approaches, have real-life limitations such as associated environmental impact and efficiency. An emerging yet effective approach is laser weeding, which uses a laser beam as the stem cutter. Although there have been studies that use deep learning in weed recognition, its application in intelligent laser weeding still requires a comprehensive understanding. Thus, this study represents the first empirical investigation of weed recognition for laser weeding. To increase the efficiency of laser beam cut and avoid damaging the crops of interest, the laser beam shall be directly aimed at the weed root. Yet, weed stem detection remains an under-explored problem. We integrate the detection of crop and weed with the localization of weed stem into one end-to-end system. To train and validate the proposed system in a real-life scenario, we curate and construct a high-quality weed stem detection dataset with human annotations. The dataset consists of 7,161 high-resolution pictures collected in the field with annotations of 11,151 instances of weed. Experimental results show that the proposed system improves weeding accuracy by 6.7% and reduces energy cost by 32.3% compared to existing weed recognition systems.

  • 8 authors
·
Feb 10, 2025

SwissCrop25: A National Multi-Year Benchmark for Operational Crop Mapping

Operational crop mapping requires models that generalise across years, resolve fine-grained crop taxonomies, and distinguish cropland from surrounding landscapes. However, existing crop mapping datasets enable evaluation of these requirements only in isolation. We therefore introduce SwissCrop25, a national-scale crop mapping benchmark dataset spanning seven growing seasons (2019-2025). SwissCrop25 combines Sentinel-2 time series, daily temperature observations, a fine-grained 73 crop taxonomy including grassland management types, and 5 explicit non-crop land cover classes. To evaluate realistic deployment conditions, we define a leave-one-year-out protocol with joint cropland delineation and crop classification for benchmarking representative crop mapping architectures. Evaluating U-TAE (convolutional temporal-attention model), TSViT (transformer-based spatio-temporal model), and Galileo (EO foundation model) reveals differences between architectures hidden by conventional benchmarks. In this setting, domain-specific models outperform Galileo, with TSViT achieving the best overall performance and a 12 pp macro-mIoU advantage over U-TAE. SwissCrop25 also exposes substantial interannual distribution shifts and shows that incorporating temperature-derived phenological information improves robustness. Finally, in-season evaluation reveals a trade-off between models, with U-TAE performing better early in the season and TSViT gaining an advantage later through improved rare-class discrimination. SwissCrop25 provides a challenging testbed for evaluating crop mapping systems under realistic operational conditions and is publicly released at https://huggingface.co/datasets/EOA-team/SwissCrop25 .

  • 4 authors
·
Aug 9

Deep Learning for Plant Identification and Disease Classification from Leaf Images: Multi-prediction Approaches

Deep learning plays an important role in modern agriculture, especially in plant pathology using leaf images where convolutional neural networks (CNN) are attracting a lot of attention. While numerous reviews have explored the applications of deep learning within this research domain, there remains a notable absence of an empirical study to offer insightful comparisons due to the employment of varied datasets in the evaluation. Furthermore, a majority of these approaches tend to address the problem as a singular prediction task, overlooking the multifaceted nature of predicting various aspects of plant species and disease types. Lastly, there is an evident need for a more profound consideration of the semantic relationships that underlie plant species and disease types. In this paper, we start our study by surveying current deep learning approaches for plant identification and disease classification. We categorise the approaches into multi-model, multi-label, multi-output, and multi-task, in which different backbone CNNs can be employed. Furthermore, based on the survey of existing approaches in plant pathology and the study of available approaches in machine learning, we propose a new model named Generalised Stacking Multi-output CNN (GSMo-CNN). To investigate the effectiveness of different backbone CNNs and learning approaches, we conduct an intensive experiment on three benchmark datasets Plant Village, Plant Leaves, and PlantDoc. The experimental results demonstrate that InceptionV3 can be a good choice for a backbone CNN as its performance is better than AlexNet, VGG16, ResNet101, EfficientNet, MobileNet, and a custom CNN developed by us. Interestingly, empirical results support the hypothesis that using a single model can be comparable or better than using two models. Finally, we show that the proposed GSMo-CNN achieves state-of-the-art performance on three benchmark datasets.

  • 4 authors
·
Oct 24, 2023

A New Dataset and Comparative Study for Aphid Cluster Detection and Segmentation in Sorghum Fields

Aphid infestations are one of the primary causes of extensive damage to wheat and sorghum fields and are one of the most common vectors for plant viruses, resulting in significant agricultural yield losses. To address this problem, farmers often employ the inefficient use of harmful chemical pesticides that have negative health and environmental impacts. As a result, a large amount of pesticide is wasted on areas without significant pest infestation. This brings to attention the urgent need for an intelligent autonomous system that can locate and spray sufficiently large infestations selectively within the complex crop canopies. We have developed a large multi-scale dataset for aphid cluster detection and segmentation, collected from actual sorghum fields and meticulously annotated to include clusters of aphids. Our dataset comprises a total of 54,742 image patches, showcasing a variety of viewpoints, diverse lighting conditions, and multiple scales, highlighting its effectiveness for real-world applications. In this study, we trained and evaluated four real-time semantic segmentation models and three object detection models specifically for aphid cluster segmentation and detection. Considering the balance between accuracy and efficiency, Fast-SCNN delivered the most effective segmentation results, achieving 80.46% mean precision, 81.21% mean recall, and 91.66 frames per second (FPS). For object detection, RT-DETR exhibited the best overall performance with a 61.63% mean average precision (mAP), 92.6% mean recall, and 72.55 on an NVIDIA V100 GPU. Our experiments further indicate that aphid cluster segmentation is more suitable for assessing aphid infestations than using detection models.

  • 11 authors
·
May 7, 2024

Re-labeling ImageNet: from Single to Multi-Labels, from Global to Localized Labels

ImageNet has been arguably the most popular image classification benchmark, but it is also the one with a significant level of label noise. Recent studies have shown that many samples contain multiple classes, despite being assumed to be a single-label benchmark. They have thus proposed to turn ImageNet evaluation into a multi-label task, with exhaustive multi-label annotations per image. However, they have not fixed the training set, presumably because of a formidable annotation cost. We argue that the mismatch between single-label annotations and effectively multi-label images is equally, if not more, problematic in the training setup, where random crops are applied. With the single-label annotations, a random crop of an image may contain an entirely different object from the ground truth, introducing noisy or even incorrect supervision during training. We thus re-label the ImageNet training set with multi-labels. We address the annotation cost barrier by letting a strong image classifier, trained on an extra source of data, generate the multi-labels. We utilize the pixel-wise multi-label predictions before the final pooling layer, in order to exploit the additional location-specific supervision signals. Training on the re-labeled samples results in improved model performances across the board. ResNet-50 attains the top-1 classification accuracy of 78.9% on ImageNet with our localized multi-labels, which can be further boosted to 80.2% with the CutMix regularization. We show that the models trained with localized multi-labels also outperforms the baselines on transfer learning to object detection and instance segmentation tasks, and various robustness benchmarks. The re-labeled ImageNet training set, pre-trained weights, and the source code are available at {https://github.com/naver-ai/relabel_imagenet}.

  • 6 authors
·
Jan 13, 2021

California Crop Yield Benchmark: Combining Satellite Image, Climate, Evapotranspiration, and Soil Data Layers for County-Level Yield Forecasting of Over 70 Crops

California is a global leader in agricultural production, contributing 12.5% of the United States total output and ranking as the fifth-largest food and cotton supplier in the world. Despite the availability of extensive historical yield data from the USDA National Agricultural Statistics Service, accurate and timely crop yield forecasting remains a challenge due to the complex interplay of environmental, climatic, and soil-related factors. In this study, we introduce a comprehensive crop yield benchmark dataset covering over 70 crops across all California counties from 2008 to 2022. The benchmark integrates diverse data sources, including Landsat satellite imagery, daily climate records, monthly evapotranspiration, and high-resolution soil properties. To effectively learn from these heterogeneous inputs, we develop a multi-modal deep learning model tailored for county-level, crop-specific yield forecasting. The model employs stratified feature extraction and a timeseries encoder to capture spatial and temporal dynamics during the growing season. Static inputs such as soil characteristics and crop identity inform long-term variability. Our approach achieves an overall R2 score of 0.76 across all crops of unseen test dataset, highlighting strong predictive performance across California diverse agricultural regions. This benchmark and modeling framework offer a valuable foundation for advancing agricultural forecasting, climate adaptation, and precision farming. The full dataset and codebase are publicly available at our GitHub repository.

  • 3 authors
·
Jun 11, 2025

Multispectral Vineyard Segmentation: A Deep Learning approach

Digital agriculture has evolved significantly over the last few years due to the technological developments in automation and computational intelligence applied to the agricultural sector, including vineyards which are a relevant crop in the Mediterranean region. In this work, a study is presented of semantic segmentation for vine detection in real-world vineyards by exploring state-of-the-art deep segmentation networks and conventional unsupervised methods. Camera data have been collected on vineyards using an Unmanned Aerial System (UAS) equipped with a dual imaging sensor payload, namely a high-definition RGB camera and a five-band multispectral and thermal camera. Extensive experiments using deep-segmentation networks and unsupervised methods have been performed on multimodal datasets representing four distinct vineyards located in the central region of Portugal. The reported results indicate that SegNet, U-Net, and ModSegNet have equivalent overall performance in vine segmentation. The results also show that multimodality slightly improves the performance of vine segmentation, but the NIR spectrum alone generally is sufficient on most of the datasets. Furthermore, results suggest that high-definition RGB images produce equivalent or higher performance than any lower resolution multispectral band combination. Lastly, Deep Learning (DL) networks have higher overall performance than classical methods. The code and dataset are publicly available at https://github.com/Cybonic/DL_vineyard_segmentation_study.git

  • 7 authors
·
Aug 2, 2021

Learning to Aggregate Multi-Scale Context for Instance Segmentation in Remote Sensing Images

The task of instance segmentation in remote sensing images, aiming at performing per-pixel labeling of objects at instance level, is of great importance for various civil applications. Despite previous successes, most existing instance segmentation methods designed for natural images encounter sharp performance degradations when they are directly applied to top-view remote sensing images. Through careful analysis, we observe that the challenges mainly come from the lack of discriminative object features due to severe scale variations, low contrasts, and clustered distributions. In order to address these problems, a novel context aggregation network (CATNet) is proposed to improve the feature extraction process. The proposed model exploits three lightweight plug-and-play modules, namely dense feature pyramid network (DenseFPN), spatial context pyramid (SCP), and hierarchical region of interest extractor (HRoIE), to aggregate global visual context at feature, spatial, and instance domains, respectively. DenseFPN is a multi-scale feature propagation module that establishes more flexible information flows by adopting inter-level residual connections, cross-level dense connections, and feature re-weighting strategy. Leveraging the attention mechanism, SCP further augments the features by aggregating global spatial context into local regions. For each instance, HRoIE adaptively generates RoI features for different downstream tasks. Extensive evaluations of the proposed scheme on iSAID, DIOR, NWPU VHR-10, and HRSID datasets demonstrate that the proposed approach outperforms state-of-the-arts under similar computational costs. Source code and pre-trained models are available at https://github.com/yeliudev/CATNet.

  • 6 authors
·
Nov 22, 2021

UniRS: Unifying Multi-temporal Remote Sensing Tasks through Vision Language Models

The domain gap between remote sensing imagery and natural images has recently received widespread attention and Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have demonstrated excellent generalization performance in remote sensing multimodal tasks. However, current research is still limited in exploring how remote sensing VLMs handle different types of visual inputs. To bridge this gap, we introduce UniRS, the first vision-language model unifying multi-temporal remote sensing tasks across various types of visual input. UniRS supports single images, dual-time image pairs, and videos as input, enabling comprehensive remote sensing temporal analysis within a unified framework. We adopt a unified visual representation approach, enabling the model to accept various visual inputs. For dual-time image pair tasks, we customize a change extraction module to further enhance the extraction of spatiotemporal features. Additionally, we design a prompt augmentation mechanism tailored to the model's reasoning process, utilizing the prior knowledge of the general-purpose VLM to provide clues for UniRS. To promote multi-task knowledge sharing, the model is jointly fine-tuned on a mixed dataset. Experimental results show that UniRS achieves state-of-the-art performance across diverse tasks, including visual question answering, change captioning, and video scene classification, highlighting its versatility and effectiveness in unifying these multi-temporal remote sensing tasks. Our code and dataset will be released soon.

  • 7 authors
·
Dec 30, 2024

Balanced Multi-Task Attention for Satellite Image Classification: A Systematic Approach to Achieving 97.23% Accuracy on EuroSAT Without Pre-Training

This work presents a systematic investigation of custom convolutional neural network architectures for satellite land use classification, achieving 97.23% test accuracy on the EuroSAT dataset without reliance on pre-trained models. Through three progressive architectural iterations (baseline: 94.30%, CBAM-enhanced: 95.98%, and balanced multi-task attention: 97.23%) we identify and address specific failure modes in satellite imagery classification. Our principal contribution is a novel balanced multi-task attention mechanism that combines Coordinate Attention for spatial feature extraction with Squeeze-Excitation blocks for spectral feature extraction, unified through a learnable fusion parameter. Experimental results demonstrate that this learnable parameter autonomously converges to alpha approximately 0.57, indicating near-equal importance of spatial and spectral modalities for satellite imagery. We employ progressive DropBlock regularization (5-20% by network depth) and class-balanced loss weighting to address overfitting and confusion pattern imbalance. The final 12-layer architecture achieves Cohen's Kappa of 0.9692 with all classes exceeding 94.46% accuracy, demonstrating confidence calibration with a 24.25% gap between correct and incorrect predictions. Our approach achieves performance within 1.34% of fine-tuned ResNet-50 (98.57%) while requiring no external data, validating the efficacy of systematic architectural design for domain-specific applications. Complete code, trained models, and evaluation scripts are publicly available.

  • 1 authors
·
Oct 17, 2025 2

AppleGrowthVision: A large-scale stereo dataset for phenological analysis, fruit detection, and 3D reconstruction in apple orchards

Deep learning has transformed computer vision for precision agriculture, yet apple orchard monitoring remains limited by dataset constraints. The lack of diverse, realistic datasets and the difficulty of annotating dense, heterogeneous scenes. Existing datasets overlook different growth stages and stereo imagery, both essential for realistic 3D modeling of orchards and tasks like fruit localization, yield estimation, and structural analysis. To address these gaps, we present AppleGrowthVision, a large-scale dataset comprising two subsets. The first includes 9,317 high resolution stereo images collected from a farm in Brandenburg (Germany), covering six agriculturally validated growth stages over a full growth cycle. The second subset consists of 1,125 densely annotated images from the same farm in Brandenburg and one in Pillnitz (Germany), containing a total of 31,084 apple labels. AppleGrowthVision provides stereo-image data with agriculturally validated growth stages, enabling precise phenological analysis and 3D reconstructions. Extending MinneApple with our data improves YOLOv8 performance by 7.69 % in terms of F1-score, while adding it to MinneApple and MAD boosts Faster R-CNN F1-score by 31.06 %. Additionally, six BBCH stages were predicted with over 95 % accuracy using VGG16, ResNet152, DenseNet201, and MobileNetv2. AppleGrowthVision bridges the gap between agricultural science and computer vision, by enabling the development of robust models for fruit detection, growth modeling, and 3D analysis in precision agriculture. Future work includes improving annotation, enhancing 3D reconstruction, and extending multimodal analysis across all growth stages.

  • 9 authors
·
May 19, 2025

A Sentinel-2 multi-year, multi-country benchmark dataset for crop classification and segmentation with deep learning

In this work we introduce Sen4AgriNet, a Sentinel-2 based time series multi country benchmark dataset, tailored for agricultural monitoring applications with Machine and Deep Learning. Sen4AgriNet dataset is annotated from farmer declarations collected via the Land Parcel Identification System (LPIS) for harmonizing country wide labels. These declarations have only recently been made available as open data, allowing for the first time the labeling of satellite imagery from ground truth data. We proceed to propose and standardise a new crop type taxonomy across Europe that address Common Agriculture Policy (CAP) needs, based on the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) Indicative Crop Classification scheme. Sen4AgriNet is the only multi-country, multi-year dataset that includes all spectral information. It is constructed to cover the period 2016-2020 for Catalonia and France, while it can be extended to include additional countries. Currently, it contains 42.5 million parcels, which makes it significantly larger than other available archives. We extract two sub-datasets to highlight its value for diverse Deep Learning applications; the Object Aggregated Dataset (OAD) and the Patches Assembled Dataset (PAD). OAD capitalizes zonal statistics of each parcel, thus creating a powerful label-to-features instance for classification algorithms. On the other hand, PAD structure generalizes the classification problem to parcel extraction and semantic segmentation and labeling. The PAD and OAD are examined under three different scenarios to showcase and model the effects of spatial and temporal variability across different years and different countries.

  • 4 authors
·
Apr 2, 2022

AgriChat: A Multimodal Large Language Model for Agriculture Image Understanding

The deployment of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) in agriculture is currently stalled by a critical trade-off: the existing literature lacks the large-scale agricultural datasets required for robust model development and evaluation, while current state-of-the-art models lack the verified domain expertise necessary to reason across diverse taxonomies. To address these challenges, we propose the Vision-to-Verified-Knowledge (V2VK) pipeline, a novel generative AI-driven annotation framework that integrates visual captioning with web-augmented scientific retrieval to autonomously generate the AgriMM benchmark, effectively eliminating biological hallucinations by grounding training data in verified phytopathological literature. The AgriMM benchmark contains over 3,000 agricultural classes and more than 607k VQAs spanning multiple tasks, including fine-grained plant species identification, plant disease symptom recognition, crop counting, and ripeness assessment. Leveraging this verifiable data, we present AgriChat, a specialized MLLM that presents broad knowledge across thousands of agricultural classes and provides detailed agricultural assessments with extensive explanations. Extensive evaluation across diverse tasks, datasets, and evaluation conditions reveals both the capabilities and limitations of current agricultural MLLMs, while demonstrating AgriChat's superior performance over other open-source models, including internal and external benchmarks. The results validate that preserving visual detail combined with web-verified knowledge constitutes a reliable pathway toward robust and trustworthy agricultural AI. The code and dataset are publicly available at https://github.com/boudiafA/AgriChat .

  • 3 authors
·
Mar 14

Token-level Correlation-guided Compression for Efficient Multimodal Document Understanding

Cropping high-resolution document images into multiple sub-images is the most widely used approach for current Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) to do document understanding. Most of current document understanding methods preserve all tokens within sub-images and treat them equally. This neglects their different informativeness and leads to a significant increase in the number of image tokens. To perform a more adaptive and efficient document understanding, we propose Token-level Correlation-guided Compression, a parameter-free and plug-and-play methodology to optimize token processing. Firstly, we propose an innovative approach for assessing the pattern repetitiveness based on the correlation between each patch tokens. This method identifies redundant tokens, allowing for the determination of the sub-image's information density. Secondly, we present a token-level sampling method that efficiently captures the most informative tokens by delving into the correlation between the [CLS] token and patch tokens. By integrating these strategies, we develop a plug-and-play adaptive compressor module that can be seamlessly incorporated into MLLMs utilizing cropping techniques. This module not only enhances the processing speed during training and inference but also maintains comparable performance. We conduct experiments with the SOTA document understanding model mPLUG-DocOwl1.5 and the effectiveness is demonstrated through extensive comparisons with other compression methods.

  • 6 authors
·
Jul 19, 2024

A Semi-Self-Supervised Approach for Dense-Pattern Video Object Segmentation

Video object segmentation (VOS) -- predicting pixel-level regions for objects within each frame of a video -- is particularly challenging in agricultural scenarios, where videos of crops include hundreds of small, dense, and occluded objects (stems, leaves, flowers, pods) that sway and move unpredictably in the wind. Supervised training is the state-of-the-art for VOS, but it requires large, pixel-accurate, human-annotated videos, which are costly to produce for videos with many densely packed objects in each frame. To address these challenges, we proposed a semi-self-supervised spatiotemporal approach for dense-VOS (DVOS) using a diffusion-based method through multi-task (reconstruction and segmentation) learning. We train the model first with synthetic data that mimics the camera and object motion of real videos and then with pseudo-labeled videos. We evaluate our DVOS method for wheat head segmentation from a diverse set of videos (handheld, drone-captured, different field locations, and different growth stages -- spanning from Boot-stage to Wheat-mature and Harvest-ready). Despite using only a few manually annotated video frames, the proposed approach yielded a high-performing model, achieving a Dice score of 0.79 when tested on a drone-captured external test set. While our method was evaluated on wheat head segmentation, it can be extended to other crops and domains, such as crowd analysis or microscopic image analysis.

  • 4 authors
·
Jun 7, 2024

BigEarthNet.txt: A Large-Scale Multi-Sensor Image-Text Dataset and Benchmark for Earth Observation

Vision-langugage models (VLMs) have shown strong performance in computer vision (CV), yet their performance on remote sensing (RS) data remains limited due to the lack of large-scale, multi-sensor RS image-text datasets with diverse textual annotations. Existing datasets predominantly include aerial Red-Green-Blue imagery, with short or weakly grounded captions, and provide limited diversity in annotation types. To address this limitation, we introduce BigEarthNet.txt, a large-scale, multi-sensor image-text dataset designed to advance instruction-driven image-text learning in Earth observation across multiple tasks. BigEarthNet.txt contains 464044 co-registered Sentinel-1 synthetic aperture radar and Sentinel-2 multispectral images with 9.6M text annotations, including: i) geographically anchored captions describing land-use/land-cover (LULC) classes, their spatial relations, and environmental context; ii) visual question answering pairs relevant for different tasks; and iii) referring expression detection instructions for bounding box prediction. Through a comparative statistical analysis, we demonstrate that BigEarthNet.txt surpasses existing RS image-text datasets in textual richness and annotation type variety. We further establish a manually-verified benchmark split to evaluate VLMs in RS and CV. The results show the limitations of these models on tasks that involve complex LULC classes, whereas fine-tuning using BigEarthNet.txt results in consistent performance gains across all considered tasks.

  • 8 authors
·
Mar 31

Empirical Study of PEFT techniques for Winter Wheat Segmentation

Parameter Efficient Fine Tuning (PEFT) techniques have recently experienced significant growth and have been extensively employed to adapt large vision and language models to various domains, enabling satisfactory model performance with minimal computational needs. Despite these advances, more research has yet to delve into potential PEFT applications in real-life scenarios, particularly in the critical domains of remote sensing and crop monitoring. The diversity of climates across different regions and the need for comprehensive large-scale datasets have posed significant obstacles to accurately identify crop types across varying geographic locations and changing growing seasons. This study seeks to bridge this gap by comprehensively exploring the feasibility of cross-area and cross-year out-of-distribution generalization using the State-of-the-Art (SOTA) wheat crop monitoring model. The aim of this work is to explore PEFT approaches for crop monitoring. Specifically, we focus on adapting the SOTA TSViT model to address winter wheat field segmentation, a critical task for crop monitoring and food security. This adaptation process involves integrating different PEFT techniques, including BigFit, LoRA, Adaptformer, and prompt tuning. Using PEFT techniques, we achieved notable results comparable to those achieved using full fine-tuning methods while training only a mere 0.7% parameters of the whole TSViT architecture. The in-house labeled data-set, referred to as the Beqaa-Lebanon dataset, comprises high-quality annotated polygons for wheat and non-wheat classes with a total surface of 170 kmsq, over five consecutive years. Using Sentinel-2 images, our model achieved a 84% F1-score. We intend to publicly release the Lebanese winter wheat data set, code repository, and model weights.

  • 5 authors
·
Oct 3, 2023 1

Adapting Vision-Language Models from Iconic to Inclusive for Multi-Label Recognition Without Labels

Understanding multi-label images remains a challenging task in computer vision. With the rapid progress of vision-language multimodal learning, vision-language models (VLMs) enable zero-shot recognition without labeled data. However, due to their intrinsic design, these models often prioritize the most iconic object and omit other contextual positives. This intrinsic bias conflicts with the nature of multi-label learning, thereby limiting their applicability. In this work, we propose an unsupervised framework that adapts VLMs from iconic recognition toward inclusive understanding, enabling label-free multi-label image recognition. Our approach consists of two key stages, ``cutting'' and ``sewing'': In the cutting stage, we present the multi-sampling response estimator to prevent the model from concentrating only on one single object. In the second sewing stage, the multi-object blend adaptation is introduced to adjust the labels to better conform to the multi-label distribution while preserving the intrinsic characteristics of the original model within only one epoch. Extensive experiments show that our framework significantly outperforms existing unsupervised approaches on four public datasets, even surpassing several representative weakly supervised baselines. These results demonstrate the potential of adapting pre-trained VLMs for more comprehensive visual understanding without manual annotations. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/iCVTEAM/TailorCLIP.

  • 4 authors
·
Jun 9

Compression with Global Guidance: Towards Training-free High-Resolution MLLMs Acceleration

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have attracted considerable attention due to their exceptional performance in visual content understanding and reasoning. However, their inference efficiency has been a notable concern, as the increasing length of multimodal contexts leads to quadratic complexity. Token compression techniques, which reduce the number of visual tokens, have demonstrated their effectiveness in reducing computational costs. Yet, these approaches have struggled to keep pace with the rapid advancements in MLLMs, especially the AnyRes strategy in the context of high-resolution image understanding. In this paper, we propose a novel token compression method, GlobalCom^2, tailored for high-resolution MLLMs that receive both the thumbnail and multiple crops. GlobalCom^2 treats the tokens derived from the thumbnail as the "commander" of the entire token compression process, directing the allocation of retention ratios and the specific compression for each crop. In this way, redundant tokens are eliminated while important local details are adaptively preserved to the highest extent feasible. Empirical results across 10 benchmarks reveal that GlobalCom^2 achieves an optimal balance between performance and efficiency, and consistently outperforms state-of-the-art token compression methods with LLaVA-NeXT-7B/13B models. Our code is released at https://github.com/xuyang-liu16/GlobalCom2.

  • 10 authors
·
Jan 9, 2025

Beyond LLaVA-HD: Diving into High-Resolution Large Multimodal Models

Seeing clearly with high resolution is a foundation of Large Multimodal Models (LMMs), which has been proven to be vital for visual perception and reasoning. Existing works usually employ a straightforward resolution upscaling method, where the image consists of global and local branches, with the latter being the sliced image patches but resized to the same resolution as the former. This means that higher resolution requires more local patches, resulting in exorbitant computational expenses, and meanwhile, the dominance of local image tokens may diminish the global context. In this paper, we dive into the problems and propose a new framework as well as an elaborate optimization strategy. Specifically, we extract contextual information from the global view using a mixture of adapters, based on the observation that different adapters excel at different tasks. With regard to local patches, learnable query embeddings are introduced to reduce image tokens, the most important tokens accounting for the user question will be further selected by a similarity-based selector. Our empirical results demonstrate a `less is more' pattern, where utilizing fewer but more informative local image tokens leads to improved performance. Besides, a significant challenge lies in the training strategy, as simultaneous end-to-end training of the global mining block and local compression block does not yield optimal results. We thus advocate for an alternating training way, ensuring balanced learning between global and local aspects. Finally, we also introduce a challenging dataset with high requirements for image detail, enhancing the training of the local compression layer. The proposed method, termed LMM with Sophisticated Tasks, Local image compression, and Mixture of global Experts (SliME), achieves leading performance across various benchmarks with only 2 million training data.

  • 7 authors
·
Jun 12, 2024 2

Vines-DB: An RGB image dataset for multi-species ornamental vine segmentation

The Vines-DB dataset contains 1,218 original high-resolution RGB images of seven ornamental vine species collected under field conditions at the Utah Agricultural Experiment Station's Greenville Research Farm in Logan, Utah, USA. The dataset was generated from 168 individual vine plants that were transplanted in 2022 and photographed repeatedly across multiple months during the 2023 and 2024 growing seasons (July-October). Images were captured with an iPhone 16 Pro equipped with a 48 MP camera between 10:00 AM and 12:00 PM under daylight. Vines were grown on 1.2m x 2.4m trellises and photographed from a distance of 1m against black or white Styrofoam backdrops to improve contrast and reduce background noise. The dataset includes Akebia quinata, Campsis radicans, Hydrangea anomala petiolaris, Lonicera x heckrottii, Campsis x tagliabuana 'Madame Galen', Parthenocissus quinquefolia, and Wisteria floribunda. All original images were manually annotated in Roboflow by trained annotators to produce polygon-based instance segmentation masks for eight classes, including seven species and background. After preprocessing and data augmentation, the working dataset was expanded to 2,307 images for model development and evaluation. The augmented dataset was divided into 2,019 training images, 192 validation images, and 96 test images using stratified sampling to maintain balanced representation. Vines-DB supports the development and evaluation of deep learning models for multi-class instance segmentation in precision horticulture and urban ecology. The dataset enables applications such as automated canopy cover estimation, species identification, and scalable field phenotyping. In addition, repeated monthly imaging of the plants captures temporal variation in canopy development and plant appearance, increasing the dataset's utility for segmentation benchmarking under realistic field conditions.

  • 4 authors
·
Jun 15