Benchmarking Out-of-Distribution Detection for Plankton Recognition: A Systematic Evaluation of Advanced Methods in Marine Ecological Monitoring

TL;DR

This paper presents a comprehensive benchmark and evaluation of 22 out-of-distribution detection methods for plankton recognition, addressing the challenge of distribution shifts in marine ecological monitoring and identifying ViM as the top performer.

Contribution

It introduces the first large-scale, systematic evaluation of OoD detection methods specifically for plankton recognition, including new benchmarks and insights into method performance.

Findings

ViM outperforms other methods in OoD detection

Significant improvements in Far-OoD scenarios

Provides a reliable reference for algorithm selection

Abstract

Automated plankton recognition models face significant challenges during real-world deployment due to distribution shifts (Out-of-Distribution, OoD) between training and test data. This stems from plankton's complex morphologies, vast species diversity, and the continuous discovery of novel species, which leads to unpredictable errors during inference. Despite rapid advancements in OoD detection methods in recent years, the field of plankton recognition still lacks a systematic integration of the latest computer vision developments and a unified benchmark for large-scale evaluation. To address this, this paper meticulously designed a series of OoD benchmarks simulating various distribution shift scenarios based on the DYB-PlanktonNet dataset \cite{875n-f104-21}, and systematically evaluated twenty-two OoD detection methods. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that the ViM \cite{wang2022vim} method significantly outperforms other approaches in our constructed benchmarks, particularly excelling in Far-OoD scenarios with substantial improvements in key metrics. This comprehensive evaluation not only provides a reliable reference for algorithm selection in automated plankton recognition but also lays a solid foundation for future research in plankton OoD detection. To our knowledge, this study marks the first large-scale, systematic evaluation and analysis of Out-of-Distribution data detection methods in plankton recognition. Code is available at https://github.com/BlackJack0083/PlanktonOoD.