Fine-Grained Image Classification

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Overview

Fine-grained image classification studies how to tell apart categories that share an overall appearance but differ in subtle details, such as bird species, vehicle models, or disease grades. Approaches include pretrained CNNs and vision transformers, part- and attention-based features, metric and contrastive learning, and methods that use class hierarchies or vision-language models; few-shot, semi-supervised, and active learning address limited labels. Benchmarks span natural species, vehicles, food, and medical images, with evaluation increasingly considering hierarchy, calibration, open-set recognition, and deployment costs alongside accuracy. A central challenge is ensuring models rely on diagnostic visual evidence and remain reliable under shifts in lighting, background, domain, or available evidence.

Latest papers

CardsList

84 papers8 papers in the last four weeks, down 11% on the four weeks before. 0.0% of all new papers.

  1. Standing on Open Shoulders: Regional Fine-Tuning of Open-Weight Camera-Trap Models for UK Wildlife with Modest Data and Compute

    Oct 23, 2026Paul FergusImage ClassificationWildlife Monitoring

    Liverpool John Moores University, Byrom Street, Liverpool L3 3AF, United Kingdom

  2. Learning Fine-Grained Visual Classification with Text as Privileged Information via Multimodal Distillation

    Oct 23, 2026Aishwarya Venkataramanan, Christian Ickler, Joachim DenzlerFine-Grained Image ClassificationLearning Using Privileged Information

    Computer Vision Group, Friedrich Schiller University Jena

  3. FSVL: Taxonomic Fast-Slow Vision-to-Language Collaborative Framework for Interpretable Confusable Fish Species Identification and Knowledge Generation in the Middle Yangtze River

    Oct 22, 2026Meng Liang, Fucheng Wang, Lang Zhao +8Fine-Grained Image ClassificationBiodiversity Monitoring

    Key Laboratory of Freshwater Biodiversity Conservation, Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs of China, Yangtze River Fisheries Research Institute, Chinese Academy of Fishery Sciences, Wuhan 430223, China · College of Biosystems Engineering and Food Science, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou 310058, Zhejiang, China · College of Fisheries, Southwest University, Chongqing 400715, China +2

  4. Auditing Where Concept Bottleneck Accuracy Comes From on CUB

    Oct 20, 2026Sascha Saralajew, Eleonora Poeta, Eliana Pastor +1Concept Bottleneck ModelsVisual Grounding

    Politecnico di Torino Turin, Italy

  5. Assessing Representation Semantics Under Language Pretraining in Fine-Grained Classification

    Oct 20, 2026Md Raisul Kibria, Sébastien LafondVisual Representation LearningSemantic Representation Learning

    Faculty of Science and Engineering, Åbo Akademi University, Turku, 20500, Finland

  6. HullProbe: Measuring Interventional Part Reliance in Maritime Vessel Classifiers

    Oct 18, 2026Faisal Mohammad, Mohamed YounisImage ClassificationFeature Attribution

    University of Maryland, Baltimore County · Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory

  7. CUBE: Class-conditioned Unknown Boundary Evidence for Open-Set Insect Species Recognition

    Oct 9, 2026Hao Tan, Qimin Zhang, Zhe Xiao +3Open-Set RecognitionFine-Grained Image Classification

    Guangdong University of Technology · The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou) · The Hong Kong Polytechnic University +1

  8. CARE: Constrained Attention Refinement for Fine-Grained Visual Classification via Teacher-Student Distillation

    Oct 8, 2026Ruibo Wen, Hang Shao, Yiming LeiFine-Grained Image ClassificationExplainable Image Classification

    College of Computer Science and Technology, Qingdao University, Qingdao, China

  9. VCRE-Fib: View-Conditioned Regional Evidence for Fine-Grained Ultrasound Grading of Schistosoma japonicum-Associated Liver Fibrosis

    Sep 26, 2026Ziyang Xu, Shuli An, Hao Zhou +5Ultrasound ImagingFine-Grained Image Classification

    Department of Mathematics, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China · Jiangsu Provincial Key Laboratory on Parasite and Vector Control Technology, National Health Commission Key Laboratory of Parasitic Disease Control and Prevention, Jiangsu Institute of Parasitic Diseases, Wuxi, Jiangsu, China · New Laboratory of Pattern Recognition (NLPR), State Key Laboratory of Multimodal Artificial Intelligence Systems (MAIS), Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences +4

  10. LENS-GRF: Permutation-Invariant Lesion Evidence Network with Gated Residual Fusion for Acne Severity Grading and Multi-Rater Clinical Oracle Analysis

    Sep 25, 2026Muhammad Muhtasim Shahriar, M. F. MridhaSet TransformerAutomated Grading

    Department of Computer Science, International Islamic University Chittagong (IIUC), Chittagong, Bangladesh · Department of Computer Science, American International University-Bangladesh (AIUB), Dhaka, Bangladesh

  11. Vision Transformers versus convolutional neural networks for fine-grained orchid genus identification in a species-rich, data-poor flora: a controlled benchmark on the Orchidaceae of New Guinea

    Sep 21, 2026Reza Saputra, Diah Harnoni Apriyanti, André Schuiteman +4Vision TransformerFine-Grained Image Retrieval

    College of Science and Engineering, James Cook University. McGregor Rd, Smithfield, Cairns, QLD 4878, Australia · Southwest Papua Natural Resources Conservation Agency, Ministry of Forestry, Indonesia. Jalan Klamono KM 16, Sorong, Southwest Papua Province, Indonesia · The Directorate of Scientific Collection Management, National Research and Innovation Agency (BRIN), Republic of Indonesia, Gedung Kehati, KST Soekarno BRIN, Jl. Raya Jakarta - Bogor KM 46, Cibinong, Kabupaten Bogor, Jawa Barat, 16911, Indonesia. +5

  12. Fragment-Aware Vision Transformers for Fresco-Fragment Style Classification

    Sep 17, 2026Sara Miketek, Biagio Barchielli, Nadeem Iqbal Kajla +1Vision TransformerFine-Grained Image Classification

    Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, Venice, Italy · Dundalk Institute of Technology, Dundalk, Ireland · University of Milan, Milan, Italy

  13. CALIPER: Metric-Grounded Model-Free Recognition of Visually Similar Industrial Parts

    Sep 15, 2026Alankrit Gupta, Chenxi Tao, Seung-Kyum ChoiFine-Grained Image ClassificationFew-Shot Image Classification

    George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering Georgia Institute of Technology Atlanta, GA, U.S.A.

  14. What Input Resolution Is Required for Bird Species Identification, and What Is Its Latency Cost on an Edge Device? A Study of 14 Input Resolutions and Six Architectures with On-Device Measurements

    Sep 13, 2026Takeshi NishikawaOn-Device InferenceEfficient Neural Network Inference

    Foundation for Computational Science (FOCUS), Kobe, Japan

  15. Phase-Aware Spatial-Frequency Fusion for Few-Shot Fine-Grained Image Classification

    Sep 3, 2026Ruiling Liu, Linyue Zhang, Wenyi Zeng +5Frequency-Domain Feature LearningFine-Grained Image Classification

  16. RouteGraph-Mona: Confusion-Aware Routing Fine-Tuning for Mineral Image Classification

    Sep 2, 2026Jierui Li, Zhiyuan Qi, Hao Zhu +7Image ClassificationParameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning

    Xidian University, Xi’an, China · Tsinghua University, Beijing, China · Guangdong Laboratory of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Economy (SZ), China

  17. ConCA: Concentration-Aware Channel Attention for Fine-Grained Visual Recognition

    Aug 31, 2026Yu-Sheng Liu, Yu-Chen TungChannel AttentionFine-Grained Image Classification

    Department of Physics, National Kaohsiung Normal University, Kaohsiung, 824, Taiwan

  18. OPAL: Orthonormal Prototype Alignment Learning for Interpretable Image Classification

    Aug 30, 2026Ilán Carretero, Gustavo Jesús Angulo, Rocío del Amor +1Prototype-Based ClassificationFine-Grained Image Classification

    CVBLab, HumanTech, Universitat Politècnica de València, Valencia, Spain · CMA, Mines Paris, PSL University, Sophia Antipolis, France · Artikode Intelligence S.L., Valencia, Spain

  19. ReCalMatch:Reliability-Calibrated Semantic Guidance for Semi-Supervised Fine-Grained Recognition

    Aug 30, 2026Yundi Hong, Hongyang He, Zheng Fang +2Semi-Supervised LearningFine-Grained Image Classification

    Department of Computer Science University of Warwick Coventry, UK · Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona, Spain

  20. Empowering Local Agriculture: A Deep Learning-Powered Web System for Identifying Bangladeshi Mango Varieties

    Aug 28, 2026Monowar Islam, Safaruzzaman ShovoAgricultural Image AnalysisClassification

    Faridpur Engineering College, University of Dhaka, Bangladesh

  21. Instruction Distillation: Text Instructions as Visual Examples

    Aug 27, 2026Hardik Jindal, Soumyabrata Pal, Sayak Ray ChowdhuryIn-Context LearningEfficient VLM Inference

    IIT Kanpur · Adobe Research

  22. DeCO: Discriminative Evidence Composition for Fine-Grained Dataset Distillation

    Aug 26, 2026Chuixuan Fan, Guang Li, Shijie Wang +5Dataset DistillationFine-Grained Image Classification

    University of Science and Technology of China · Hokkaido University · The University of Queensland +2

  23. A Lightweight Multimodal Vision-Language Framework for Early-Stage Anatomical Green Fruit Classification in Commercial Orchards

    Aug 23, 2026Ranjan Sapkota, William Bu, Chen Chen +2Agricultural Image AnalysisFine-Grained Image Classification

    Cornell University, Department of Environmental and Biological Engineering, USA · Department of Computer Science, University of Central Florida, USA · Institute of Artificial Intelligence (IAI) & Department of Computer Science, University of Central Florida, USA +1

  24. Multi-Scale Fruit Capsules: Dilated Convolutions and Dynamic Routing for In-the-Wild Explainable Fruit Recognition

    Aug 20, 2026Subhankar Chattoraj, Sawon Pratiher, Samiran Das +1Fine-Grained Image ClassificationExplainable Image Classification

    Dept. of Information Systems, University of Maryland Baltimore County, Baltimore, MD 21250, USA · Dept. of Electrical Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur, West Bengal 721302, India · Dept of Data Science and Engineering, Indian Institute of Science Education and Research Bhopal 462066, India +1

  25. H2^2EDL: Hyper Evidential Deep Learning for Hierarchical Classification

    Aug 18, 2026Yuanye Liu, Xiahai ZhuangHierarchical ClassificationEvidential Deep Learning

    School of Data Science, Fudan University

  26. BoltNet: An Ultra-Lightweight Convolutional Network for On-Device Plant Species Identification

    Aug 12, 2026Daniel Rossi, Guido Borghi, Roberto VezzaniFine-Grained Image ClassificationLightweight CNNs

    University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, Modena, Italy

  27. One-Time Training for All Grains: Open-Set Grain Recognition and Quantitative Analysis

    Aug 10, 2026Qihe Su, Mengyu Sun, Yuxi Ke +4Plant PhenotypingObject Counting

    National Key Laboratory of Crop Genetic Improvement, National Center of Plant Gene Research, Hubei Hongshan Laboratory, Huazhong Agricultural University, Wuhan, 430070, China · College of Engineering, Huazhong Agricultural University, Wuhan, 430070, China · Engineering Research Center of Intelligent Technology for Agriculture, Ministry of Education +1

  28. Fourier Self-Supervision for Fine-Grained Generalized Category Discovery

    Aug 9, 2026Sarah Rastegar, Mina Ghadimi Atigh, Pascal Mettes +2Frequency-Domain Feature LearningFine-Grained Image Classification

    University of Amsterdam · University of Technology Nuremberg

  29. OliveGemma: A 3 Billion Visual Language Model for Recognising the Mediterranean & European Diet

    Aug 4, 2026Dimitrios I. Zaridis, Traianos Tsiokris, Vasileios C. Pezoulas +6Large Vision-Language ModelsFine-Grained Image Classification

    Unit of Medical Technology & Intelligent Information Systems University of Ioannina Ioannina, Greece · Department of Medical Physics, School of Medicine University of Patras Patras, Greece · Computational BioMedicine Laboratory Foundation for Research and Technology Hellas Heraklion, Greece +2

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

    Aug 3, 2026Hugo Markoff, Christoph Praschl, Anton Hjalte Jørgensen +5Selective PredictionHuman-in-the-Loop Annotation

    Aalborg University, Department of Chemistry and Bioscience, Aalborg, Denmark · University of Applied Sciences Upper Austria, Hagenberg, Austria · Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA