Building a bird recognition app and large scale dataset with citizen scientists: The fine print in fine-grained dataset collection

We introduce tools and methodologies to collect high quality, large scale fine-grained computer vision datasets using citizen scientists - crowd annotators who are passionate and knowledgeable about specific domains such as birds or airplanes. We worked with citizen scientists and domain experts to collect NABirds, a new high quality dataset containing 48,562 images of North American birds with 555 categories, part annotations and bounding boxes. We find that citizen scientists are significantly more accurate than Mechanical Turkers at zero cost. We worked with bird experts to measure the quality of popular datasets like CUB-200-2011 and ImageNet and found class label error rates of at least 4%. Nevertheless,…