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

arXiv · AI, language, vision and robotics · article · Sep 7, 2026 · UTC

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 surpass

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