Frozen Vision Transformers for Dense Prediction on Small Datasets: A Case Study in Arrow Localization

arXiv cs.CV / 4/21/2026

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Key Points

  • The paper introduces an automated arrow puncture detection, localization, and scoring system for indoor archery targets using only 48 annotated photos.
  • Its pipeline uses a color-based rectification step to normalize perspective and a frozen self-supervised vision transformer (DINOv3 ViT-L/16) with AnyUp-guided feature upsampling to recover sub-millimeter precision from small patch tokens.
  • Lightweight CenterNet-style heatmap detection heads are trained with only 3.8M trainable parameters out of 308M total, enabling strong sample efficiency.
  • Experiments across three cross-validation folds report a mean F1 of 0.893 (±0.011) and a mean localization error of 1.41 (±0.06) mm, with downstream scoring errors around a 1.8% median error.
  • An ablation study finds that an offset regression head (commonly used for sub-pixel refinement) adds little detection benefit and can hurt localization, suggesting the guided upsampling already restores spatial precision lost in tokenization.

Abstract

We present a system for automated detection, localization, and scoring of arrow punctures on 40\,cm indoor archery target faces, trained on only 48 annotated photographs (5{,}084 punctures). Our pipeline combines three components: a color-based canonical rectification stage that maps perspective-distorted photographs into a standardized coordinate system where pixel distances correspond to known physical measurements; a frozen self-supervised vision transformer (DINOv3 ViT-L/16) paired with AnyUp guided feature upsampling to recover sub-millimeter spatial precision from 32 \times 32 patch tokens; and lightweight CenterNet-style detection heads for arrow-center heatmap prediction. Only 3.8\,M of 308\,M total parameters are trainable. Across three cross-validation folds, we achieve a mean F1 score of 0.893 \pm 0.011 and a mean localization error of 1.41 \pm 0.06\,mm, comparable to or better than prior fully-supervised approaches that require substantially more training data. An ablation study shows that the CenterNet offset regression head, typically essential for sub-pixel refinement, provides negligible detection improvement while degrading localization in our setting. This suggests that guided feature upsampling already resolves the spatial precision lost through patch tokenization. On downstream archery metrics, the system recovers per-image average arrow scores with a median error of 1.8\% and group centroid positions to within a median of 4.00\,mm. These results demonstrate that frozen foundation models with minimal task-specific adaptation offer a practical paradigm for dense prediction in small-data regimes.