ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge 2013 (ILSVRC2013)

Introduction History Data Tasks Timetable Citation^new Organizers Sponsors Contact

News

September 2, 2014: A new paper which describes the collection of the ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge dataset, analyzes the results of the past five years of the challenge, and even compares current computer accuracy with human accuracy is now available. Please cite it when reporting ILSVRC2013 results or using the dataset.
February 21, 2013: ILSVRC 2013 automated test server is available.
November 14, 2013: ILSVRC 2013 results are available! Details about the methods coming up at the ICCV 2013 workshop.
November 11, 2013: Submission site is up. Please submit your results here. (See FAQ for details.)
September 19, 2013: ICCV 2013 workshop page is up.
August 15, 2013: The development kit and data are released.
July 15, 2013: Registration page is up. Please register
March 18, 2013: We are preparing to run the ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge 2013 (ILSVRC2013). Stay tuned!
March 18, 2013: The newFine-Grained Challenge 2013 will run concurrently with ILSVRC2013.

Introduction

This challenge evaluates algorithms for object detection and image classification at large scale. This year there will be three competitions:

A PASCAL-style detection challenge on fully labeled data for 200 categories of objects,^NEW
An image classification challenge with 1000 categories, and
An image classification plus object localization challenge with 1000 categories.

One high level motivation is to allow researchers to compare progress in detection across a wider variety of objects -- taking advantage of the quite expensive labeling effort. Another motivation is to measure the progress of computer vision for large scale image indexing for retrieval and annotation.

History

Data

Dataset 1: Detection

This year there is a new object detection task similar in style to PASCAL VOC Challenge. There are 200 basic-level categories for this task which are fully annotated on the test data, i.e. bounding boxes for all categories in the image have been labeled. The categories were carefully chosen considering different factors such as object scale, level of image clutterness, average number of object instance, and several others. Some of the test images will contain none of the 200 categories.

Comparative scale

		PASCAL VOC 2012	ILSVRC 2013
Number of object classes		20	200
Training	Num images	5717	395909
Training	Num objects	13609	345854
Validation	Num images	5823	20121
Validation	Num objects	13841	55502
Testing	Num images	10991	40152
Testing	Num objects	---	---

Comparative statistics (on validation set)

	PASCAL VOC 2012	ILSVRC 2013
Average image resolution	469x387 pixels	482x415 pixels
Average object classes per image	1.521	1.534
Average object instances per image	2.711	2.758
Average object scale (bounding box area as fraction of image area)	0.207	0.170*

* has been corrected from previous version

Example ILSVRC2013 images:

Browse the 200 detection categories here.

Note: people detection on ILSVRC2013 may be of particular interest. There are 12125 images for training (9877 of them contain people, for a total of 17728 instances), 20121 images for validation (5756 of them contain people, for a total of 12823 instances) and 40152 images for testing. There is significant variability in pose and appearance, in part due to interaction with a variety of objects. In the validation set, people appear in the same image with 196 of the other labeled object categories.

Dataset 2: Classification and classification with localization

The data for the classification and classification with localization tasks will remain unchanged from ILSVRC 2012 . The validation and test data will consist of 150,000 photographs, collected from flickr and other search engines, hand labeled with the presence or absence of 1000 object categories. The 1000 object categories contain both internal nodes and leaf nodes of ImageNet, but do not overlap with each other. A random subset of 50,000 of the images with labels will be released as validation data included in the development kit along with a list of the 1000 categories. The remaining images will be used for evaluation and will be released without labels at test time.

The training data, the subset of ImageNet containing the 1000 categories and 1.2 million images, will be packaged for easy downloading. The validation and test data for this competition are not contained in the ImageNet training data.

Browse the 1000 classification categories here.

Tasks

Task 1: Detection ^NEW

For each image, algorithms will produce a set of annotations $(c_i, b_i, s_i)$ of class labels $c_i$, bounding boxes $b_i$ and confidence scores $s_i$. This set is expected to contain each instance of each of the 200 object categories. Objects which were not annotated will be penalized, as will be duplicate detections (two annotations for the same object instance). The winner of the detection challenge will be the team which achieves first place accuracy on the most object categories.

Task 2: Classification and localization

In this task, given an image an algorithm will produce 5 class labels $c_i, i=1,\dots 5$ in decreasing order of confidence and 5 bounding boxes $b_i, i=1,\dots 5$, one for each class label. The quality of a labeling will be evaluated based on the label that best matches the ground truth label for the image. The idea is to allow an algorithm to identify multiple objects in an image and not be penalized if one of the objects identified was in fact present, but not included in the ground truth.

The ground truth labels for the image are $C_k, k=1,\dots n$ with $n$ class labels. For each ground truth class label $C_k$, the ground truth bounding boxes are $B_{km},m=1\dots M_k$, where $M_k$ is the number of instances of the $k^\text{th}$ object in the current image.

Let $d(c_i,C_k) = 0$ if $c_i = C_k$ and 1 otherwise. Let $f(b_i,B_k) = 0$ if $b_i$ and $B_k$ have more than $50\%$ overlap, and 1 otherwise. The error of the algorithm on an individual image will be computed using two metrics:

Classification-only: \[ e= \frac{1}{n} \cdot \sum_k \min_i d(c_i,C_k) \]
Classification-with-localization: \[ e=\frac{1}{n} \cdot \sum_k min_{i} min_{m} max \{d(c_i,C_k), f(b_i,B_{km}) \} \]

The classification-only and classification-with-localization errors of the algorithm is the average corresponding error across all test images.

Development Kit

Development kit (updated Aug 24, 2013)
Please be sure to consult the included readme.txt file for competition details. Additionally, the development kit includes

Overview and statistics of the data.
Meta data for the competition categories.
Matlab routines for evaluating submissions.

Please register to obtain the download links for the data.

Timetable

August 15, 2013: Development kit, data and evaluation software made available.
November 15, 2013: Submission deadline.
November 22, 2013: Extended deadline for updating the submitted entries (details in FAQ).
December 7, 2013: ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge 2013 workshop at ICCV 2013. Challenge participants with the most successful and innovative methods will be invited to present.