The study benchmarks Vision Transformers (ViTs) against convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for fine‑grained orchid genus identification in New Guinea’s species‑rich, data‑poor flora. Using a two‑stage system that first predicts genus and then retrieves similar species images, the authors fine‑tuned four pretrained backbones on 16,701 photographs from 120 genera and 1,350 species. The self‑supervised ViT DINOv2 achieved the highest genus accuracy (macro top‑1 66.9 %) and outperformed both CNNs and a domain‑matched pretrained ViT, demonstrating strong species retrieval and open‑set detection capabilities.
By Reza Saputra, Diah Harnoni Apriyanti, Andr\'e Schuiteman, Kurt Metzger, Ashley Field, Katharina Nargar, William Edwards
The paper presents the first scalable, end‑to‑end pipeline for automated detection of fossil palynomorphs in whole‑slide, multifocal digital microscopy images. It introduces efficient image decomposition and compression into 2‑D tiles, benchmarks modern object detection models (including RF‑DETR) achieving an AP@50 of 0.879, and provides algorithms for synthesizing detections across large‑scale images. The pipeline reduces analysis time from days of manual inspection to under one hour, enabling larger‑scale palynological studies.
By Abbas Shaikh, Praise Mayor, Patrick Ainlay-Vazquez, Aditya Viswanathan, Teon Golden, Eric Zhang, Ingrid C. Romero, Alexander E. White, Scott Wing, Arko Barman
arXiv:2603. 13377v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Representation learning has driven major advances in natural image analysis by enabling models to acquire high-level semantic features.
By Ivan Svatko, Maxime Sanchez, Ihab Bendidi, Gilles Cottrell, Auguste Genovesio
STA‑Net is a lightweight neural network designed for plant disease classification on edge devices. It combines a training‑free neural architecture search (DeepMAD) to build an efficient backbone with a novel Shape‑Texture Attention Module (STAM) that separates shape and texture processing using deformable convolutions and a Gabor filter bank. On the CCMT plant disease dataset, STA‑Net achieved 89.00% accuracy and 88.96% F1 score with only 401K parameters and 51.1M FLOPs.
By Zongsen Qiu, Jianjun Wang, Yue Zhou, Zibo Zhou, Rui Chen
arXiv:2604. 17376v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In today's day and age, we face a challenge in detecting deepfake images because of the fast evolution of modern generative models and the poor generalization capability of existing methods.
By Kaliki V Srinanda, M Manvith Prabhu, Hemanth K Mogilipalem, Jayavarapu S Abhinai, Vaibhav Santhosh, Aryan Herur, Deepu Vijayasenan
arXiv:2608. 11053v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The application of computer vision in agriculture has shown significant potential for improving crop monitoring and precision farming.
By Ismail Ismail Tijjani, Sunusi Muhammad Ibrahim, Amina Ibrahim Khaleel, Lanre Olusegun Akinola, Fatima Isa Jibrin, Muhammad Bashir Aliyu, Abdullahi Abdussalam Dalhat, Abdullahi Suiudeen