Forward-Facing Near-Infrared Adds Little to Colour for Farm-Machinery Traversability: A Site-Disjoint Evaluation of Sensor-Dependent Spatial Leakage
Near-infrared (NIR) imaging does not consistently outperform standard color cameras for daytime agricultural traversability once spatial data leakage is eliminated. Prior benchmarks suggesting an NIR advantage used sequence-level splits that permitted spatially autocorrelated imagery into test sets, artificially inflat...