Caltech 101

Caltech 101 is a data set of digital images created in September 2003 and compiled by Fei-Fei Li, Marco Andreetto, Marc 'Aurelio Ranzato and Pietro Perona at the California Institute of Technology. It is intended to facilitate Computer Vision research and techniques and is most applicable to techniques involving image recognition classification and categorization. Caltech 101 contains a total of 9,146 images, split between 101 distinct object categories (faces, watches, ants, pianos, etc.) and a background category. Provided with the images are a set of annotations describing the outlines of each image, along with a Matlab script for viewing.

Most Computer Vision and Machine Learning algorithms function by training on example inputs. They require a large and varied set of training data to work effectively. For example, the real-time face detection method used by Paul Viola and Michael J. Jones was trained on 4,916 hand-labeled faces.

Cropping, re-sizing and hand-marking points of interest is tedious and time-consuming.

Historically, most data sets used in computer vision research have been tailored to the specific needs of the project being worked on.A large problem in comparing computer vision techniques is the fact that most groups use their own data sets. Each set may have different properties that make reported results from different methods harder to compare directly. For example, differences in image size, image quality, relative location of objects within the images and level of occlusion and clutter present can lead to varying results.

The Caltech 101 data set aims at alleviating many of these common problems.

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