Revisiting continual ultra-fine-grained visual recognition with pre-trained models

Continual ultra-fine-grained visual recognition (C-UFG) aims to continuously learn to categorize the increasing number of cultivates (VC-UFG) and consistently recognize crops across reproductive stages (HC-UFG), which is a fundamental goal of intelligent agriculture. Despite the progress made in general continual learning, C-UFG remains an underexplored issue. This work establishes the first comprehensive C-UFG benchmark using massive soy leaf data. By analyzing recent pre-trained model (PTM) based continual learning methods on the proposed benchmark, we propose two simple yet effective PTM-based methods to boost the performance of VC-UFG and HC-UFG, respectively. On top of those, we integrate the two methods into one unified framework and propose the first unified model, Unic, that is capable of tackling the C-UFG problem where VC-UFG and HC-UFG coexist in a single continual learning sequence. To understand the effectiveness of the proposed methods, we first evaluate the models on VC-UFG and HC-UFG challenges and then test the proposed Unic on a unified C-UFG challenge. Experimental results demonstrate the proposed methods achieve superior performance for C-UFG. The code is available at https://github.com/PatrickZad/unicufg.