Sabine J. Seidel

Ahmed Emam, Mohamed Elbassiouny, Julius Miller et al.

Pollinator insects such as honeybees and bumblebees are vital to global food production and ecosystem stability, yet their populations are declining due to anthropogenic and environmental stressors. Scalable, automated monitoring in agricultural environments remains an open challenge due to the difficulty of detecting small, fast-moving, and often camouflaged insects. To address this, we present BuzzSet v1.0, a large-scale dataset of high-resolution pollinator images collected under real field conditions. BuzzSet contains 7,856 manually verified images with more than 8,000 annotated instances across three classes: honeybees, bumblebees, and unidentified insects. Initial annotations were produced using a YOLOv12 model trained on external data and refined through human verification with open-source tools. All images were preprocessed into 256 x 256 tiles to improve the detection of small insects. We provide baselines using the RF-DETR transformer-based object detector. The model achieves strong classification accuracy with F1 scores of 0.94 and 0.92 for honeybees and bumblebees, with minimal confusion between these categories. The unidentified class remains more difficult due to label ambiguity and fewer samples, yet still contributes insights for robustness evaluation. Overall detection performance (mAP at 0.50 of 0.559) illustrates the challenging nature of the dataset and its potential to drive advances in small object detection under realistic ecological conditions. Future work focuses on expanding the dataset to version 2.0 with additional annotations and evaluating further detection strategies. BuzzSet establishes a benchmark for ecological computer vision, with the primary challenge being reliable detection of insects frequently camouflaged within natural vegetation, highlighting an open problem for future research.

Lukas Drees, Dereje T. Demie, Madhuri R. Paul et al.

Image-based crop growth modeling can substantially contribute to precision agriculture by revealing spatial crop development over time, which allows an early and location-specific estimation of relevant future plant traits, such as leaf area or biomass. A prerequisite for realistic and sharp crop image generation is the integration of multiple growth-influencing conditions in a model, such as an image of an initial growth stage, the associated growth time, and further information about the field treatment. We present a two-stage framework consisting first of an image prediction model and second of a growth estimation model, which both are independently trained. The image prediction model is a conditional Wasserstein generative adversarial network (CWGAN). In the generator of this model, conditional batch normalization (CBN) is used to integrate different conditions along with the input image. This allows the model to generate time-varying artificial images dependent on multiple influencing factors of different kinds. These images are used by the second part of the framework for plant phenotyping by deriving plant-specific traits and comparing them with those of non-artificial (real) reference images. For various crop datasets, the framework allows realistic, sharp image predictions with a slight loss of quality from short-term to long-term predictions. Simulations of varying growth-influencing conditions performed with the trained framework provide valuable insights into how such factors relate to crop appearances, which is particularly useful in complex, less explored crop mixture systems. Further results show that adding process-based simulated biomass as a condition increases the accuracy of the derived phenotypic traits from the predicted images. This demonstrates the potential of our framework to serve as an interface between an image- and process-based crop growth model.