Plankton microorganisms play a huge role in the aquatic food web. Recently, it has been proposed to use plankton as a biosensor, since they can react to even minimal perturbations of the aquatic environment with specific physiological changes, which may lead to alterations in morphology and behavior. Nowadays, the development of high-resolution in-situ automatic acquisition systems allows the research community to obtain a large amount of plankton image data. Fundamental examples are the ZooScan and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) datasets, comprising up to millions of plankton images. However, obtaining unbiased annotations is expensive both in terms of time and resources, and in-situ acquired datasets generally suffer from severe imbalance, with only a few images available for several species. Transfer learning is a popular solution to these challenges, with ImageNet1K being the most-used source dataset for pre-training. On the other hand, datasets like the ZooScan and the WHOI may represent a valuable opportunity to compare out-of-domain and large-scale plankton in-domain source datasets, in terms of performance for the task at hand.In this paper, we design three transfer learning pipelines for plankton image classification, with the aim of comparing in-domain and out-of-domain transfer learning on three popular benchmark plankton datasets. The general framework consists in fine-tuning a pre-trained model on a plankton target dataset. In the first pipeline, the model is pre-trained from scratch on a large-scale plankton dataset, in the second, it is pre-trained on large-scale natural image datasets (ImageNet1K or ImageNet22K), while in the third, a two-stage fine-tuning is implemented (ImageNet [Formula: see text] large-scale plankton dataset [Formula: see text] target plankton dataset). Our results show that an out-of-domain ImageNet22K pre-training outperforms the plankton in-domain ones, with an average boost in test accuracy of around 6%. In the next part of this work, we adopt three ImageNet22k pre-trained Vision Transformers and one ConvNeXt, obtaining results on par (or slightly superior) with the state-of-the-art, corresponding to the usage of CNN models ensembles, with a single model. Finally, we design and test an ensemble of our Vision Transformers and the ConvNeXt, outperforming the state-of-the-art existing works on plankton image classification on the three target datasets. To support scientific community contribution and further research, our implemented code is open-source and available at https://github.com/Malga-Vision/plankton_transfer .
