RareSpot+: A Benchmark, Model, and Active Learning Framework for Small and Rare Wildlife in Aerial Imagery

ArXi:2604.20000v1 Announce Type: new Automated wildlife monitoring from aerial imagery is vital for conservation but remains limited by two persistent challenges: the difficulty of detecting small, rare species and the high cost of large-scale expert annotation. Prairie dogs exemplify this problem -- they are ecologically important yet appear tiny, sparsely distributed, and visually indistinct from their surroundings, posing a severe challenge for conventional detection models.