Forward-Facing Near-Infrared Adds Little to Colour for Farm-Machinery Traversability: A Site-Disjoint Evaluation of Sensor-Dependent Spatial Leakage

Abstract

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 inflating NIR performance, especially on difficult paddy-boundary segmentation. When evaluated across strictly held-out recording sites using the AI Hub autonomous driving corpus, none of the four tested configurations (color, NIR, a luminance control, or their fusion) reliably surpasses standard color across any of the five traversability classes. Furthermore, apparent performance gains observed at a single held-out site completely fail to replicate when the held-out site is rotated, demonstrating that the observed benefits were site-specific artifacts rather than generalizable improvements. Correcting for spatial leakage erases the apparent lead of NIR entirely rather than uniformly degrading performance across all sensor types. Consequently, adding a forward-facing NIR camera to a daylight agricultural vehicle sensor suite remains unproven, and evaluations compromised by location leakage risk distorting sensor rankings and misleading procurement decisions.