# ReLeaf: Benchmarking Leaf Segmentation across Domains and Species

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.03784 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.03784/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 17 of its 42 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 5 May 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 17 of 17)

- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [DINOv2: Learning Robust Visual Features without Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07193/) (2023)
- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [Deformable DETR: Deformable Transformers for End-to-End Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.04159/) (2020)
- [Rethinking Semantic Segmentation from a Sequence-to-Sequence Perspective with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.15840/) (2020)
- [DETRs Beat YOLOs on Real-time Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08069/) (2023)
- [YOLACT: Real-time Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.02689/) (2019)
- [RT-DETRv2: Improved Baseline with Bag-of-Freebies for Real-Time Detection Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.17140/) (2024)
- [RF-DETR: Neural Architecture Search for Real-Time Detection Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.09554/) (2025)
- [PhenoBench -- A Large Dataset and Benchmarks for Semantic Image Interpretation in the Agricultural Domain](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.04557/) (2023)
- [Poly-YOLO: higher speed, more precise detection and instance segmentation for YOLOv3](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.13243/) (2020)
- [Hierarchical Approach for Joint Semantic, Plant Instance, and Leaf Instance Segmentation in the Agricultural Domain](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.07879/) (2022)
- [GrowliFlower: An image time series dataset for GROWth analysis of cauLIFLOWER](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.00294/) (2022)
- [Leaf Counting with Deep Convolutional and Deconvolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.07570/) (2017)
- [Data Augmentation for Leaf Segmentation and Counting Tasks in Rosette Plants](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.08583/) (2019)
- [WeedsGalore: A Multispectral and Multitemporal UAV-based Dataset for Crop and Weed Segmentation in Agricultural Maize Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.13103/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Rising global food demand and growing climate pressure increase the need for sustainable, precise agricultural practices. Automated, individualized plant treatment relies on fine-grained visual analysis, yet leaf-level segmentation remains underexplored despite its value for assessing crop health, growth dynamics, yield potential and localized stress symptoms. Progress is limited by a lack of dedicated datasets, especially regarding species coverage, and by the absence of systematic evaluations of modern instance-segmentation architectures for this task. We address these gaps by surveying current data and identifying four suitable, publicly available leaf-segmentation datasets. Using them, we compare one-stage, two-stage and Transformer-based detectors and identify a YOLO26 model configuration to provide the best trade-off for real-world precision-agriculture tasks. Extensive cross-domain generalization experiments reveal substantial performance drops across plant species and recording setups, especially for models trained solely on laboratory data. To strengthen data availability, we introduce a new benchmark dataset with leaf-level masks for 23 plant species, created via semi-automatic annotation of selected CropAndWeed images. A model trained on all four existing datasets achieves a mean mAP50-95 of 83.9% across their corresponding test sets and 40.2% on our new benchmark, demonstrating improved generalization and highlighting the need for diverse leaf-segmentation datasets in robust precision agriculture.