Open-Insect: Benchmarking Open-Set Recognition of Novel Species in Biodiversity Monitoring

Global biodiversity is declining at an unprecedented rate, yet little information is known about most species and how their populations are changing. Indeed, some 90% of Earth's species are estimated to be completely unknown. Machine learning has recently emerged as a promising tool to facilitate long-term, large-scale biodiversity monitoring, including algorithms for fine-grained classification of species from images. However, such algorithms typically are not designed to detect examples from categories unseen during training -- the problem of open-set recognition (OSR) -- limiting their applicability for highly diverse, poorly studied taxa such as insects. To address this gap, we introduce Open-Insect, a large-scale, fine-grained dataset to evaluate unknown species detection across different geographic regions with varying difficulty. We benchmark 38 OSR algorithms across three categories: post-hoc, training-time regularization, and training with auxiliary data, finding that simple post-hoc approaches remain a strong baseline. We also demonstrate how to leverage auxiliary data to improve species discovery in regions with limited data. Our results provide insights to guide the development of computer vision methods for biodiversity monitoring and species discovery.