HyBEAR: a hyperspectral benchmark for bare soil detection

Detecting bare soil areas is an important step in the analysis of Earth observation data in a variety of Precision Agriculture (PA) applications focused on quantifying soil properties and assessing soil quality. In this paper, we introduce the HyBEAR benchmark – a novel large-scale collection of high-resolution hyperspectral aerial images (with 2 m ground sampling distance) accompanied by manual bare soil annotations verified by domain experts. Usually, the bare soil detection problem is tackled at the pixel level, meaning that detection methods classify all pixels as either bare soil or background. In contrast to this approach, we provide pixel-level annotations for the entire agricultural parcels (if the parcel is labeled as bare soil, then all pixels within that parcel are labeled accordingly), and aim to support the development of methods that identify entire fields with no vegetation. Commonly, such fields undergo further analysis to determine specific soil parameters and characteristics that are important when planning various PA activities, such as fertilization. The HyBEAR benchmark includes (i) the largest-to-date (108 064 591 pixels, corresponding to 43 225 ha) and most heterogeneous dataset for bare soil detection, as well as (ii) the validation procedure (training-test splits and quality metrics) and a set of baseline results, obtained for a set of machine learning bare soil detection models. From the FULL collection of 1954 images in HyBEAR, which we divided into 5 spatially-disjoint folds, we additionally selected a random, stratified subset (MINI) of the images which may be useful for designing and verifying bare soil detection algorithms. Overall, HyBEAR is a step toward standardizing the way the community builds and confronts bare soil detection algorithms in a thorough, reproducible, and unbiased way. The dataset is publicly available at Zenodo: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17607897 (Wijata et al., 2025).