Skip to content

Dataset representation

Each dataset is represented by a pandas dataframe. Each row corresponds to one entry, which depicts one individual animal. Usually one entry corresponds to one image and one animal. However, sometimes, there are multiple animals in an image and then one image may generate multiple entries differentiated by additional information such as bounding box. Columns are descriptions of the entry.

Required columns

The following three columns must be part of all dataframes.

Column Type Description
id int or str Unique id of the entry.
identity int or str Identity (or label) of the depicted individual animal.
path str Relative path to the image.

There is a special value for identity which describes an unknown individual. Its default value for unknown animals is

from wildlife_datasets import datasets

datasets.DatasetFactory.unknown_name
unknown

When a dataset contains unknown inidividuals, there identities should be changed to the default value.

Optional columns

The following columns may be present in the dataframe. Besides these columns, it is possible to define additional columns.

Column Type Description
bbox List[float] Bounding box in the form [x, y, w, h]. Therefore, the topleft corner has coordinates [x, y], while the bottomright corner has coordinates [x+w, y+h].
date special Timestamp of the photo. The preferred format is %Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S from the datetime package but it is sufficient to be amenable to pd.to_datetime(x).
keypoints List[float] Keypoints coordinates in the image such as eyes or joints.
position str Position from each the photo was taken. The usual values are left and right.
segmentation List[float] or special Segmentation mask in the form [x1, y1, x2, y2, ...]. Additional format are possible such as file path to a mask image, or pytorch RLE.
species str or List[str] The depicted species for datasets with multiple species.
video int The index of a video.

Metadata

Besides the dataframe, each dataset also contains some metadata. The metadata are saved in a separate csv file, which currently contains the following information. All entries are optional.

Column Description
name Name of the dataset.
licenses License file for the dataset.
licenses_url URL for the license file.
url URL for the dataset.
cite Citation in Google Scholar type of the paper.
animals List of all animal species in the dataset.
animals_simple List of all animal species in the dataset.
real_animals Determines whether the dataset contains real animals.
year Publication year of the dataset.
reported_n_total The reported number of total animals.
reported_n_identified The reported number of identified animals.
reported_n_photos The reported number of photos.
eported_n_individuals The reported number of individuals.
wild Determines whether the photos were taken in the wild.
clear_photos Determines whether the photos are clear.
pose Determines whether the photos have one orientation (single), two orientation such as left and right flanks (double) or more (multiple).
unique_pattern Determines whether the animals have unique features (fur patern, fin shape) for recognition.
from_video Determines whether the dataset was created from photos or videos.
cropped Determines whether the photos are cropped.
span The span of the dataset (the time difference between the last and first photos).
size Size of the zipped datasets (in MB).