# BarkNet-Lite: A Lightweight Texture and Colour Network with the BarkBD Benchmark for Bark-Based Tree Species Recognition in Bangladesh

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.07600 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.07600/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 34 of its 65 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 7 Sep 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 34)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Distilling the Knowledge in a Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.02531/) (2015)
- [Batch Normalization: Accelerating Deep Network Training by Reducing Internal Covariate Shift](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.03167/) (2015)
- [Grad-CAM: Visual Explanations from Deep Networks via Gradient-based Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02391/) (2016)
- [Rethinking the Inception Architecture for Computer Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.00567/) (2015)
- [mixup: Beyond Empirical Risk Minimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.09412/) (2017)
- [SGDR: Stochastic Gradient Descent with Warm Restarts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.03983/) (2016)
- [On Calibration of Modern Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.04599/) (2017)
- [MobileNetV2: Inverted Residuals and Linear Bottlenecks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.04381/) (2018)
- [Squeeze-and-Excitation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.01507/) (2017)
- [Going Deeper with Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.4842/) (2014)
- [CutMix: Regularization Strategy to Train Strong Classifiers with Localizable Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.04899/) (2019)
- [CBAM: Convolutional Block Attention Module](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.06521/) (2018)
- [Learning Deep Features for Discriminative Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.04150/) (2015)
- [Xception: Deep Learning with Depthwise Separable Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02357/) (2016)
- [Searching for MobileNetV3](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.02244/) (2019)
- [Quantization and Training of Neural Networks for Efficient Integer-Arithmetic-Only Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.05877/) (2017)
- [Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI): Concepts, Taxonomies, Opportunities and Challenges toward Responsible AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10045/) (2019)
- [Sanity Checks for Saliency Maps](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.03292/) (2018)
- [Multi-Scale Context Aggregation by Dilated Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.07122/) (2015)
- [When Does Label Smoothing Help?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.02629/) (2019)
- [Grad-CAM++: Improved Visual Explanations for Deep Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.11063/) (2017)
- [RISE: Randomized Input Sampling for Explanation of Black-box Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.07421/) (2018)
- [Recognition in Terra Incognita](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.04975/) (2018)
- [MobileViT: Light-weight, General-purpose, and Mobile-friendly Vision Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.02178/) (2021)
- [Quantizing deep convolutional networks for efficient inference: A whitepaper](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.08342/) (2018)
- [Data-Free Quantization Through Weight Equalization and Bias Correction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.04721/) (2019)
- [Separable Self-attention for Mobile Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.02680/) (2022)
- [Rethinking Vision Transformers for MobileNet Size and Speed](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.08059/) (2022)
- [MobileNetV4 -- Universal Models for the Mobile Ecosystem](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.10518/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Tree species recognition supports forest inventory and biodiversity monitoring but still depends on scarce taxonomic expertise. Bark is visible year-round at ground level, yet bark recognition has concentrated on temperate floras and on large ImageNet-pre-trained backbones. We address both gaps. First, we release BarkBD, a bark dataset for Bangladesh: 14,258 uncropped smartphone photographs of 20 native species across four districts and three weather conditions, with a fixed stratified split. Second, we propose BarkNet-Lite, a 2.96M-parameter network trained from random initialisation, pairing a multi-scale texture pathway with a parallel colour-aware pathway. Over five seeds it reaches 96.64+-0.66%accuracyunderstrict single-image inference, within 2.3 points of nine ImageNet-pre-trained backbones fine-tuned under an identical protocol and within one seed-level standard deviation of the smallest ofthem, andtransfers to public benchmarks (95.86% on BarkVN-50, 92.85% on BarkNet 1.0). Grad-CAM, validated by faithfulness and weight-randomisation checks, confirms its decisions rest on bark structure rather than background. The exported single-precision model classifies one photograph in 15.34ms on a commodity smartphone.