Photorealistic Inpainting for Perturbation-based Explanations in Ecological Monitoring

Fuente: arXiv
Enregistré dans:
Détails bibliographiques
Auteurs principaux: Aghakishiyeva, Günel, Zhou, Jiayi, Arya, Saagar, Dale, Julian, Poling, James David, Houliston, Holly R., Womble, Jamie N., Larsen, Gregory D., Johnston, David W., Bent, Brinnae
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2025
Sujets:
Accès en ligne:
Tags: Ajouter un tag
Pas de tags, Soyez le premier à ajouter un tag!
_version_ 1866911228984557568
author Aghakishiyeva, Günel
Zhou, Jiayi
Arya, Saagar
Dale, Julian
Poling, James David
Houliston, Holly R.
Womble, Jamie N.
Larsen, Gregory D.
Johnston, David W.
Bent, Brinnae
author_facet Aghakishiyeva, Günel
Zhou, Jiayi
Arya, Saagar
Dale, Julian
Poling, James David
Houliston, Holly R.
Womble, Jamie N.
Larsen, Gregory D.
Johnston, David W.
Bent, Brinnae
contents Ecological monitoring is increasingly automated by vision models, yet opaque predictions limit trust and field adoption. We present an inpainting-guided, perturbation-based explanation technique that produces photorealistic, mask-localized edits that preserve scene context. Unlike masking or blurring, these edits stay in-distribution and reveal which fine-grained morphological cues drive predictions in tasks such as species recognition and trait attribution. We demonstrate the approach on a YOLOv9 detector fine-tuned for harbor seal detection in Glacier Bay drone imagery, using Segment-Anything-Model-refined masks to support two interventions: (i) object removal/replacement (e.g., replacing seals with plausible ice/water or boats) and (ii) background replacement with original animals composited onto new scenes. Explanations are assessed by re-scoring perturbed images (flip rate, confidence drop) and by expert review for ecological plausibility and interpretability. The resulting explanations localize diagnostic structures, avoid deletion artifacts common to traditional perturbations, and yield domain-relevant insights that support expert validation and more trustworthy deployment of AI in ecology.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_03317
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Photorealistic Inpainting for Perturbation-based Explanations in Ecological Monitoring
Aghakishiyeva, Günel
Zhou, Jiayi
Arya, Saagar
Dale, Julian
Poling, James David
Houliston, Holly R.
Womble, Jamie N.
Larsen, Gregory D.
Johnston, David W.
Bent, Brinnae
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Ecological monitoring is increasingly automated by vision models, yet opaque predictions limit trust and field adoption. We present an inpainting-guided, perturbation-based explanation technique that produces photorealistic, mask-localized edits that preserve scene context. Unlike masking or blurring, these edits stay in-distribution and reveal which fine-grained morphological cues drive predictions in tasks such as species recognition and trait attribution. We demonstrate the approach on a YOLOv9 detector fine-tuned for harbor seal detection in Glacier Bay drone imagery, using Segment-Anything-Model-refined masks to support two interventions: (i) object removal/replacement (e.g., replacing seals with plausible ice/water or boats) and (ii) background replacement with original animals composited onto new scenes. Explanations are assessed by re-scoring perturbed images (flip rate, confidence drop) and by expert review for ecological plausibility and interpretability. The resulting explanations localize diagnostic structures, avoid deletion artifacts common to traditional perturbations, and yield domain-relevant insights that support expert validation and more trustworthy deployment of AI in ecology.
title Photorealistic Inpainting for Perturbation-based Explanations in Ecological Monitoring
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.03317