Microsoft Common Objects in Context (COCO) Dataset

The Common Objects in Context (COCO) dataset is a widely recognized collection designed to spur object detection, segmentation, and captioning research. Created by Microsoft, COCO provides annotations, including object categories, keypoints, and more. The model it a valuable asset for machine learning practitioners and researchers. Today, many model architectures are benchmarked against COCO, which has enabled a standard system by which architectures can be compared.

While COCO is often touted to comprise over 300k images, it's pivotal to understand that this number includes diverse formats like keypoints, among others. Specifically, the labeled dataset for object detection stands at 123,272 images.

The full object detection labeled dataset is made available here, ensuring researchers have access to the most comprehensive data for their experiments. With that said, COCO has not released their test set annotations, meaning the test data doesn't come with labels. Thus, this data is not included in the dataset.

The Roboflow team has worked extensively with COCO. Here are a few links that may be helpful as you get started working with this dataset:

• An introduction to the COCO dataset
• Weird images in COCO, and what that tells us about the utility and limits of COCO

COCO is a large-scale object detection, segmentation, and captioning dataset.

Note: * Some images from the train and validation sets don't have annotations. * Coco 2014 and 2017 uses the same images, but different train/val/test splits * The test split don't have any annotations (only images). * Coco defines 91 classes but the data only uses 80 classes. * Panotptic annotations defines defines 200 classes but only uses 133.

To use this dataset:

import tensorflow_datasets as tfds

ds = tfds.load('coco', split='train')
for ex in ds.take(4):
 print(ex)

See the guide for more informations on tensorflow_datasets.

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