Artificial vision models for the identification of Mediterranean flora: An analysis in four ecosystems

Object identification has been widely used in several applications, utilising the annotated data with bounding boxes to specify each object’s exact location and category in images and videos. However, relatively little research has been conducted on identifying plant species in their natural environments. Natural habitats play a crucial role in preserving biodiversity, ecological balance, and overall ecosystem health. So, effective monitoring of habitats is necessary for safeguarding them, and one way of doing this is by identifying the typical and early warning plant species. Our study quantitatively evaluates the performance of six popular object detection models on our dataset collected in the wild, comprising various plant species from four habitats: screes, dunes, grasslands, and forests. The dataset employed in this work includes the data collected by human operators and the quadrupedal robot ANYmal C. The pre-trained object detection models have been chosen for experiments, and they are fine-tuned on our dataset to achieve better performance. These models incorporate two one-stage (RetinaNet and YOLOv8n), two two-stage (Faster RCNN and Cascade RCNN), and two transformer-based detectors (DETR and Deformable DETR). Extensive experimentation has been performed on the four habitat datasets by applying class balancing and hyperparameter tuning, and the obtained results are discussed.