An Update to the ImageNet Website and Dataset

March 11, 2021

We are proud to see ImageNet's wide adoption going beyond what was originally envisioned. However, the decade-old website was burdened by growing download requests. To serve the community better, we have redesigned the website and upgraded its hardware. The new website is simpler; we removed tangential or outdated functions to focus on the core use case—enabling users to download the data, including the full ImageNet dataset and the ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge (ILSVRC).

Meanwhile, the computer vision community has progressed, and so has ImageNet. The dataset was created to benchmark object recognition—at a time when it barely worked. The problem then was how to collect labeled images at a sufficiently large scale to be able to train complex models in laboratories. Today, computer vision is in real-world systems impacting people's Internet experience and daily lives. An emerging problem now is how to make sure computer vision is fair and preserves people's privacy. We are continually evolving ImageNet to address these emerging needs.

In a FAT* 2020 paper, we filtered 2,702 synsets in the "person" subtree that may cause problematic behaviors of the model. We have updated the full ImageNet data on the website to remove these synsets. The update does not affect the 1,000 categories in ILSVRC.

In a more recent paper, we investigate privacy issues in ILSVRC. 997 out of 1000 categories in ILSVRC are not people categories; nevertheless, many incidental people are in the images, whose privacy is a concern. We first annotated faces in the images and then constructed a face-blurred version of ILSVRC. Experiments show that one can use the face-blurred version for benchmarking object recognition and for transfer learning with only marginal loss of accuracy. We release our face annotations to facilitate further research on privacy-aware visual recognition.

Team members working on these new improvements: Kaiyu Yang (Princeton), Jacqueline Yau (Stanford), Li Fei-Fei (Stanford), Jia Deng (Princeton), Olga Russakovsky (Princeton).