Weakly supervised framework for wildlife detection and counting in challenging Arctic environments: a case study on caribou (Rangifer tarandus)

ArXi:2601.18891v3 Announce Type: replace Caribou across the Arctic has declined in recent decades, motivating scalable and accurate monitoring approaches to guide evidence-based conservation actions and policy decisions. Manual interpretation from this imagery is labor-intensive and error-prone, underscoring the need for automatic and reliable detection across varying scenes. Yet, such automatic detection is challenging due to severe background heterogeneity, dominant empty terrain (class imbalance), small or occluded targets, and wide variation in density and scale.