Pl@ntNet-300K-v2 image dataset

Pl@ntNet-300K-v2 is an image dataset designed for evaluating set-valued classification methods. It is derived from the Pl@ntNet citizen observatory database and comprises 306,087 images spanning 1,000 plant species.The new version provides improved images resolution and better naming for the species.

Key Features

The dataset reflects two notable characteristics, intrinsic to both the image acquisition process and the morphological diversity of plants:

Strong class imbalance: A few species account for the majority of images.

Visual similarity: Many species are visually indistinguishable, posing challenges even for expert identification.

These attributes make Pl@ntNet-300K-v2 particularly suited for benchmarking set-valued classification approaches.

Dataset Structure

Image Organization

Images are partitioned into train, test, and val sets, stored in directories labeled 0000 to 0999.

Metadata Files

1. plantnet300K_metadata.csv

Contains 306,087 image entries, each with the following fields:

Field
Description

species_id
Numerical species index (0–999)

PN_observation_id
Unique Pl@ntNet observation identifier

organ
Plant organ in the image (leaf, flower, other, habit, fruit, etc.)

author
Photographer’s identity

license
Image license type (cc-by-sa, cc-by-nc, cc-by-nc-sa)

split
Dataset partition (train, test, val)

PN_hash
Image hash name

2. species_metadata.csv

Provides taxonomic and conservation details for each species (aligned with the World Checklist of Vascular Plants, v13):

Field
Description

species_id
Numerical species index (matches image directories)

full_species
Full species name (with author)

species
Species name (without author)

genus
Genus name

family
Family name

epithet
Species epithet

author
Species name author(s)

unmatched_terms
Unresolved terms (e.g., spp., f.)

iucn_status
IUCN conservation status (e.g., EX, CR, EN, VU, LC, DD, NE)

Resources

Scientific Publication

The dataset and baseline results are described in:

Garcin et al. (2021), NeurIPS Datasets and Benchmarks

Utilities

PyTorch tools for data loading and model training:

GitHub Repository

Citation

If you use this dataset, please cite the following publication:

@inproceedings{Garcin_Joly_Bonnet_Affouard_Lombardo_Chouet_Servajean_Lorieul_Salmon2021,
author = {Garcin, C. and Joly, A. and Bonnet, P. and Affouard, A. and Lombardo, J.-C. and Chouet, M. and Servajean, M. and Lorieul, T. and Salmon, J.},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the Neural Information Processing Systems Track on Datasets and Benchmarks},
pdf = {https://datasets-benchmarks-proceedings.neurips.cc/paper/2021/file/7e7757b1e12abcb736ab9a754ffb617a-Paper-round2.pdf},
title = {Pl@ntNet-300K: a plant image dataset with high label ambiguity and a long-tailed distribution},
year = {2021},
comment = {[<a href="https://github.com/plantnet/PlantNet-300K">Code</a>]}
}