M181_multiclass

Second stage of the PISCO dual-ViT: taxon classification of crops the binary stage called living. Fine-tuned google/vit-base-patch16-224-in21k on expert-validated crops from cruise M181 (tropical Atlantic, April-May 2022). Test accuracy 96.17% (13 classes).

Classes (13): Appendicularia, Asteroidea larvae, Bacillariophyceae, Chaetognatha, Cnidaria, Copepoda, Ctenophora, Eumalacostraca, Noctiluca sp., Pyrocystis, Rhizaria, Thaliacea, Trichodesmium

Known limitations

• Echinoderm pluteus larvae are systematically labelled Rhizaria - the model has no pluteus class. On a North Sea dataset (ATAIR-BSH) 2,354 objects called Rhizaria were on validation almost entirely pluteus.
• Asteroidea larvae and Noctiluca sp. are deprecated taxa in EcoTaxa; the pipeline remaps them to Asteroidea / Noctiluca at export so imports remain validatable.
• Trained on tropical Atlantic plankton; expect a domain gap elsewhere.

Important: this model is coupled to its preprocessing

Trained on crops produced by the 231204 LUCYD deconvolution (lucyd-edof-plankton_231204.pth, the pipeline default) with non-isolated crops (neighbouring particles present). Running it on crops from a different deconvolution model, or on neighbour-isolated crops, is an out-of-domain shift: measured on ATAIR-BSH, swapping the deconvolution alone collapsed the living rate by 83-93% at unchanged confidence. Treat deconvolution + crop isolation + classifier as one versioned unit.

Preprocessing: resize longest edge to 224, centre-pad to 224x224 with white (255), normalise mean=std=0.5. No rotation at inference. Crops must carry no scale bar (or have it removed with utils.strip_scale_bar).

Use in the pipeline

These are the pipeline defaults (--binary-model-dir / --living-model-dir), or from any machine:

process_pisco_profiles.py --binary-model-hf Veit/M181_binary --living-model-hf Veit/M181_multiclass
process_pisco_profiles.py --dualvit-model M181     # resolves both from the Hub when not local