# Back Home: A Computer Vision Solution to Seashell Identification for Ecological Restoration

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.04873 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.04873/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 18 of its 48 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 8 Jan 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 18 of 18)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [Emerging Properties in Self-Supervised Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14294/) (2021)
- [Densely Connected Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.06993/) (2016)
- [MobileNetV2: Inverted Residuals and Linear Bottlenecks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.04381/) (2018)
- [Training data-efficient image transformers & distillation through attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.12877/) (2020)
- [A ConvNet for the 2020s](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.03545/) (2022)
- [Enhancing The Reliability of Out-of-distribution Image Detection in Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02690/) (2017)
- [SqueezeNet: AlexNet-level accuracy with 50x fewer parameters and <0.5MB model size](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.07360/) (2016)
- [PaDiM: a Patch Distribution Modeling Framework for Anomaly Detection and Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.08785/) (2020)
- [A Comprehensive Survey of Hallucination Mitigation Techniques in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.01313/) (2024)
- [Unsupervised Real-Time Hallucination Detection based on the Internal States of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.06448/) (2024)
- [Mitigating Entity-Level Hallucination in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.09417/) (2024)
- [Efficient Medical Image Retrieval Using DenseNet and FAISS for BIRADS Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.01473/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [ShellfishNet: A Domain-Specific Benchmark for Visual Recognition of Marine Molluscs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.07338/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Illegal souvenir collection strips an estimated five tonnes of seashells from Costa Rica's beaches each year. Yet, once these specimens are seized, their coastal origin -- Pacific or Caribbean -- cannot be verified easily due to the lack of information, preventing their return when confiscated by local authorities. To solve this issue, we introduce BackHome19K, the first large-scale image corpus (19,058 photographs, 516 species) annotated with coast-level labels, and propose a lightweight pipeline that infers provenance in real time on a mobile-grade CPU. A trained anomaly filter pre-screens uploads, increasing robustness to user-generated noise. On a held-out test set, the classifier attains 86.3% balanced accuracy, while the filter rejects 93% of 180 out-of-domain objects with zero false negatives. Deployed as a web application, the system has already processed 70,000 shells for wildlife officers in under three seconds per image, enabling confiscated specimens to be safely repatriated to their native ecosystems. The dataset is available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/FIFCO/BackHome19K