"ScatSpotter" -- A Dog Poop Detection Dataset

TL;DR

The paper introduces 'ScatSpotter', a new dataset of annotated images for detecting small, camouflaged dog feces in outdoor environments, aiming to improve environmental cleanup methods.

Contribution

It provides a large, annotated dataset for small object detection, along with baseline results and analysis of model performance, supporting future research in this area.

Findings

Tuned DINO achieves 0.69 AP on validation set.

Zero-shot DINO performs poorly on this task.

The dataset presents significant detection challenges for current models.

Abstract

Small, amorphous waste objects such as biological droppings and microtrash can be difficult to see, especially in cluttered scenes, yet they matter for environmental cleanliness, public health, and autonomous cleanup. We introduce "ScatSpotter": a new dataset of images annotated with polygons around dog feces, collected to train and study object detection and segmentation systems for small potentially camouflaged outdoor waste. We gathered data in mostly urban environments, using "before/after/negative" (BAN) protocol: for a given location, we capture an image with the object present, an image from the same viewpoint after removal, and a nearby negative scene that often contains visually similar confusers. Image collection began in 2020. This paper focuses on two dataset checkpoints from 2025 and 2024. The dataset contains over 9000 images and 6000 polygon annotations. Of the author-captured images we held out 691 for validation and used the rest to train. Via community participation we obtained a 121-image test set that, while small, is independent from author-collected images and provides some generalization confidence across photographers, devices, and locations. Due to its limited size, we report both validation and test results. We explore the difficulty of the dataset using off-the-shelf VIT, MaskRCNN, YOLO-v9, and DINO-v2 models. Zero-shot DINO performs poorly, indicating limited foundational-model coverage of this category. Tuned DINO is the best model with a box-level average precision of 0.69 on a 691-image validation set and 0.7 on the test set. These results establish strong baselines and quantify the remaining difficulty of detecting small, camouflaged waste objects. To support open access to models and data, we compare centralized and decentralized distribution mechanisms and discuss trade-offs for sharing scientific data. Code and project details are hosted on GitHub.