Reefscan Dinov2 Coral

ReefScan — DINOv2-B coral health classifier (+ conformal calibration)

Binary coral-colony health classifier — healthy vs bleached — built on a DINOv2-B backbone, with a packaged split-conformal calibration so predictions can be returned as coverage-guaranteed prediction sets rather than bare labels.

This repo backs ReefScan — an end-to-end, deployed reef-health pipeline (SAM2 segmentation → this classifier → conformal uncertainty → observability + active-learning). Live demo: https://reefscan.vercel.app

Files

linear_probe/  model.safetensors · config.json · conformal.json   # frozen backbone + linear head
finetune/      model.safetensors · config.json · conformal.json   # last 2 blocks + head unfrozen

Each conformal.json holds the LAC qhat (90% target coverage) calibrated on the held-out val split. The deployed app serves finetune.

Results (held-out test split, 1,565 images)

stage	accuracy	macro-F1	conformal coverage	avg. set size
linear probe	0.857	0.846	0.914	1.120
fine-tune	0.895	0.887	0.923	1.075

Per-class (fine-tune, test): healthy — P 0.90 / R 0.93 / F1 0.92; bleached — P 0.88 / R 0.84 / F1 0.86. Calibration: ECE = 0.046 (well-calibrated). Confusion matrix: [[906, 68], [96, 495]].

Conformal LAC vs APS (90% target): LAC gives 0.923 marginal coverage at avg set size 1.075; APS over-covers (0.996) with avg set 1.954. Class-conditional coverage under LAC is healthy 0.952 vs bleached 0.876 — marginal conformal does not guarantee per-class coverage; the minority class is under-covered (a known limitation; Mondrian/class-conditional conformal is the fix).

Specialist vs. frontier VLM: on the same test set, this specialist (0.895 acc / 0.887 F1 / 0.046 ECE) beats zero-shot GPT-4o (0.805 / 0.790 / 0.152) — ~9 pts accuracy and ~3× better calibrated, at a fraction of the serving cost.

Coverage is the empirical fraction of test colonies whose conformal set contains the true label (90% target; split conformal is designed to be slightly conservative). The fine-tune is better-calibrated: average set size drops to 1.075, i.e. ~92% of colonies get a single confident label and only ~8% are flagged uncertain for human review.

Intended use

Decision-support for reef-health screening from underwater imagery: flag likely-bleached colonies and surface uncertain cases for expert review. Not a substitute for in-water expert assessment. Trained on NOAA-PIFSC Pacific reef imagery; performance on other regions, gear, or water conditions is unverified.

Training data

NMFS-OSI/NOAA-PIFSC-ESD Coral Bleaching Dataset — ~10,419 pre-cropped colony patches, image-level labels (CORAL=healthy, CORAL_BL=bleached), native site/year-controlled train/val/test splits, ~62% healthy / 38% bleached.

Training procedure

DINOv2-B backbone, 224×224 inputs, ImageNet normalization, AdamW, cosine schedule, 10 epochs, cross-entropy. Linear probe freezes the backbone (1,538-param head); fine-tune additionally unfreezes the last 2 transformer blocks + final norm. Trained on a single free GPU session (Kaggle/Colab); checkpointed every epoch and resumable. See the training notebook.

Conformal calibration

Split-conformal LAC (Least Ambiguous set-valued Classifier): nonconformity score s = 1 − p[true], qhat = the ⌈(n+1)(1−α)⌉/n quantile on the val split (α = 0.10). A test colony's set is { k : p_k ≥ 1 − qhat } (never empty). Set size > 1 ⇒ uncertain ⇒ routed to human review in the app. This is what turns a point classifier into a calibrated, review-triggering one.

Usage

import json, torch
from huggingface_hub import hf_hub_download
from safetensors.torch import load_file
from transformers import AutoModel
import torch.nn as nn

STAGE = "finetune"
class DINOv2Classifier(nn.Module):
    def __init__(self, n=2):
        super().__init__()
        self.backbone = AutoModel.from_pretrained("facebook/dinov2-base")
        self.head = nn.Linear(self.backbone.config.hidden_size, n)
    def forward(self, x):
        o = self.backbone(pixel_values=x)
        return self.head(o.pooler_output)

m = DINOv2Classifier()
m.load_state_dict(load_file(hf_hub_download("HrishiKabra/reefscan-dinov2-coral", f"{STAGE}/model.safetensors")))
m.eval()
qhat = json.load(open(hf_hub_download("HrishiKabra/reefscan-dinov2-coral", f"{STAGE}/conformal.json")))["qhat"]
# probs -> conformal set: classes = ["healthy","bleached"]; keep k where p_k >= 1 - qhat

Limitations & bias

Binary only (dead/algae_covered are future work); single-region training data; whole-patch classification (no fine localization within a colony); WaterNet enhancement is currently a passthrough. The conformal guarantee is marginal over the test distribution — it holds in aggregate, not per-individual-image, and assumes the deployment distribution matches calibration.

Citation

Dataset: NMFS-OSI / NOAA-PIFSC-ESD Coral Bleaching Dataset. Backbone: DINOv2 (Meta AI). Project: https://github.com/HrishiKabra/reefscan