ReLeaf: Benchmarking Leaf Segmentation across Domains and Species

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Martinko, Robert, Steininger, Daniel, Simon, Julia, Trondl, Andreas, Blaickner, Matthias
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Martinko, Robert
Steininger, Daniel
Simon, Julia
Trondl, Andreas
Blaickner, Matthias
author_facet Martinko, Robert
Steininger, Daniel
Simon, Julia
Trondl, Andreas
Blaickner, Matthias
contents Rising global food demand and growing climate pressure increase the need for sustainable, precise agricultural practices. Automated, individualized plant treatment relies on fine-grained visual analysis, yet leaf-level segmentation remains underexplored despite its value for assessing crop health, growth dynamics, yield potential and localized stress symptoms. Progress is limited by a lack of dedicated datasets, especially regarding species coverage, and by the absence of systematic evaluations of modern instance-segmentation architectures for this task. We address these gaps by surveying current data and identifying four suitable, publicly available leaf-segmentation datasets. Using them, we compare one-stage, two-stage and Transformer-based detectors and identify a YOLO26 model configuration to provide the best trade-off for real-world precision-agriculture tasks. Extensive cross-domain generalization experiments reveal substantial performance drops across plant species and recording setups, especially for models trained solely on laboratory data. To strengthen data availability, we introduce a new benchmark dataset with leaf-level masks for 23 plant species, created via semi-automatic annotation of selected CropAndWeed images. A model trained on all four existing datasets achieves a mean mAP50-95 of 83.9% across their corresponding test sets and 40.2% on our new benchmark, demonstrating improved generalization and highlighting the need for diverse leaf-segmentation datasets in robust precision agriculture.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_03784
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle ReLeaf: Benchmarking Leaf Segmentation across Domains and Species
Martinko, Robert
Steininger, Daniel
Simon, Julia
Trondl, Andreas
Blaickner, Matthias
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Rising global food demand and growing climate pressure increase the need for sustainable, precise agricultural practices. Automated, individualized plant treatment relies on fine-grained visual analysis, yet leaf-level segmentation remains underexplored despite its value for assessing crop health, growth dynamics, yield potential and localized stress symptoms. Progress is limited by a lack of dedicated datasets, especially regarding species coverage, and by the absence of systematic evaluations of modern instance-segmentation architectures for this task. We address these gaps by surveying current data and identifying four suitable, publicly available leaf-segmentation datasets. Using them, we compare one-stage, two-stage and Transformer-based detectors and identify a YOLO26 model configuration to provide the best trade-off for real-world precision-agriculture tasks. Extensive cross-domain generalization experiments reveal substantial performance drops across plant species and recording setups, especially for models trained solely on laboratory data. To strengthen data availability, we introduce a new benchmark dataset with leaf-level masks for 23 plant species, created via semi-automatic annotation of selected CropAndWeed images. A model trained on all four existing datasets achieves a mean mAP50-95 of 83.9% across their corresponding test sets and 40.2% on our new benchmark, demonstrating improved generalization and highlighting the need for diverse leaf-segmentation datasets in robust precision agriculture.
title ReLeaf: Benchmarking Leaf Segmentation across Domains and Species
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.03784