PlankFormer: Robust Plankton Instance Segmentation via MAE-Pretrained Vision Transformers and Pseudo Community Image Generation

ArXi:2604.17856v1 Announce Type: new Plankton monitoring is essential for assessing aquatic ecosystems but is limited by the labor-intensive nature of manual microscopic analysis. Automating the segmentation of plankton from crowded images is crucial, however, it faces two major challenges: (i) the scarcity of pixel-level annotated datasets and (ii) the difficulty of distinguishing plankton from debris and overlapping individuals using conventional CNN-based methods. To address these issues, we propose PlankFormer, a novel framework for plankton instance segmentation.