Oh Deer, How Should I Handle This? Seasonal Priors for Selective Wildlife Annotation and Classification 文章

arXiv:2608.02762v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Fine-grained wildlife classification in aerial imagery is limited not only by model performance, but also by unreliable labels: animals occupy few pixels, key visual cues vary seasonally, and modality-specific evidence can be ambiguous. We study adult-male identification in red deer, where the antler cycle defines predictable windows of reliable evidence for both annotation and prediction. Using 7,295 RGB-only, thermal-only, and matched RGB+thermal crop sets labeled by three annotators, we show that seasonal structure links (I) annotation quality, (II) downstream classification, and (III) selective prediction. Matched RGB+thermal review resolves more samples than either single modality, recovering majority-male labels otherwise missed by RGB or thermal alone, in human based as well as model based classification.