PlantCLEF 2020

Motivation

For several centuries, botanists have collected, catalogued and systematically stored plant specimens in herbaria. These physical specimens are used to study the variability of species, their phylogenetic relationship, their evolution, or phenological trends. One of the key step in the workflow of botanists and taxonomists is to find the herbarium sheets that correspond to a new specimen observed in the field. This task requires a high level of expertise and can be very tedious. Developing automated tools to facilitate this work is thus of crucial importance. More generally, this will help to convert these invaluable centuries-old materials into FAIR data.

Data collection

The task will rely on a large collection of more than 60,000 herbarium sheets that were collected in French Guyana (i.e. from the Herbier IRD de Guyane ) and digitized in the context of the e-ReColNat project. iDigBio (the US National Resource for Advancing Digitization of Biodiversity Collections) hosts millions of images of herbarium specimens. Several tens of thousands of these images, illustrating the French Guyana flora, will be used for the PlantCLEF task this year. A valuable asset of this collection is that several herbarium sheets are accompanied by a few pictures of the same specimen in the field. For the test set, we will use in-the-field pictures coming different sources including Pl@ntNet and Encyclopedia of Life.

Task description

The challenge will be evaluated as a cross-domain classification task. The training set will consist of herbarium sheets whereas the test set will be composed of field pictures. To enable learning a mapping between the herbarium sheets domain and the field pictures domain, we will provide both herbarium sheets and field pictures for a subset of species. The metrics used for the evaluation of the task will be the classification accuracy and the Mean Reciprocal Rank.

How to participate ?

See registrations instructions here. Fast link to the challenge on AICrowd: PlantCLEF 2020

Reward

The winner of each of the four LifeCLEF 2020 challenges will be offered a cloud credit grants of 5k USD as part of Microsoft's AI for earth program.

Results

The overview paper presenting the results of the challenge is available here (ceur-ws proceeedings)

A total of 7 participating groups submitted 49 runs. Thanks to all of you for your efforts!

This second graph focuses on the very difficult sub-part of the test set and reorders the submissions according to the second metric.

Credits