LifeCLEF 2017 lab overview: Multimedia Species identification challenges

Abstract

Automated multimedia identification tools are an emerging solution towards building accurate knowledge of the identity, the geographic distribution and the evolution of living plants and animals. Large and structured communities of nature observers as well as big monitoring equipment have actually started to produce outstanding collections of multimedia records. Unfortunately, the performance of the state-of-the-art analysis techniques on such data is still not well understood and far from reaching real world requirements. The LifeCLEF lab proposes to evaluate these challenges around 3 tasks related to multimedia information retrieval and fine-grained classification problems in 3 domains. Each task is based on large volumes of real-world data and the measured challenges are defined in collaboration with biologists and environmental stakeholders to reflect realistic usage scenarios. For each task, we report the methodology, the data sets as well as the results and the main outcomes.