Vision Foundation Models in Agriculture: Toward Domain-Specific Adaptation for Weed Herbicide Trials Assessment

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Benito-Del-Valle, Leire, Picón, Artzai, Mugica, Daniel, Ramos, Manuel, Portillo, Eva, Romero, Javier, Jimenez, Carlos Javier, Navarra-Mestre, Ramón
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Benito-Del-Valle, Leire
Picón, Artzai
Mugica, Daniel
Ramos, Manuel
Portillo, Eva
Romero, Javier
Jimenez, Carlos Javier
Navarra-Mestre, Ramón
author_facet Benito-Del-Valle, Leire
Picón, Artzai
Mugica, Daniel
Ramos, Manuel
Portillo, Eva
Romero, Javier
Jimenez, Carlos Javier
Navarra-Mestre, Ramón
contents Herbicide field trials require accurate identification of plant species and assessment of herbicide-induced damage across diverse environments. While general-purpose vision foundation models have shown promising results in complex visual domains, their performance can be limited in agriculture, where fine-grained distinctions between species and damage types are critical. In this work, we adapt a general-purpose vision foundation model to herbicide trial characterization. Trained using a self-supervised learning approach on a large, curated agricultural dataset, the model learns rich and transferable representations optimized for herbicide trials images. Our domain-specific model significantly outperforms the best general-purpose foundation model in both species identification (F1 score improvement from 0.91 to 0.94) and damage classification (from 0.26 to 0.33). Under unseen conditions (new locations and other time), it achieves even greater gains (species identification from 0.56 to 0.66; damage classification from 0.17 to 0.27). In domain-shift scenarios, such as drone imagery, it maintains strong performance (species classification from 0.49 to 0.60). Additionally, we show that domain-specific pretraining enhances segmentation accuracy, particularly in low-annotation regimes. An annotation-efficiency analysis reveals that, under unseen conditions, the domain-specific model achieves 5.4% higher F1 score than the general-purpose model, while using 80% fewer labeled samples. These results demonstrate the generalization capabilities of domain-specific foundation models and their potential to significantly reduce manual annotation efforts, offering a scalable and automated solution for herbicide trial analysis.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2511_04288
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Vision Foundation Models in Agriculture: Toward Domain-Specific Adaptation for Weed Herbicide Trials Assessment
Benito-Del-Valle, Leire
Picón, Artzai
Mugica, Daniel
Ramos, Manuel
Portillo, Eva
Romero, Javier
Jimenez, Carlos Javier
Navarra-Mestre, Ramón
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Herbicide field trials require accurate identification of plant species and assessment of herbicide-induced damage across diverse environments. While general-purpose vision foundation models have shown promising results in complex visual domains, their performance can be limited in agriculture, where fine-grained distinctions between species and damage types are critical. In this work, we adapt a general-purpose vision foundation model to herbicide trial characterization. Trained using a self-supervised learning approach on a large, curated agricultural dataset, the model learns rich and transferable representations optimized for herbicide trials images. Our domain-specific model significantly outperforms the best general-purpose foundation model in both species identification (F1 score improvement from 0.91 to 0.94) and damage classification (from 0.26 to 0.33). Under unseen conditions (new locations and other time), it achieves even greater gains (species identification from 0.56 to 0.66; damage classification from 0.17 to 0.27). In domain-shift scenarios, such as drone imagery, it maintains strong performance (species classification from 0.49 to 0.60). Additionally, we show that domain-specific pretraining enhances segmentation accuracy, particularly in low-annotation regimes. An annotation-efficiency analysis reveals that, under unseen conditions, the domain-specific model achieves 5.4% higher F1 score than the general-purpose model, while using 80% fewer labeled samples. These results demonstrate the generalization capabilities of domain-specific foundation models and their potential to significantly reduce manual annotation efforts, offering a scalable and automated solution for herbicide trial analysis.
title Vision Foundation Models in Agriculture: Toward Domain-Specific Adaptation for Weed Herbicide Trials Assessment
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.04288