AgriPest: A large-scale domain-specific benchmark dataset for practical agricultural pest detection in the wild

The recent explosion of large volume of standard dataset of annotated images has offered promising opportunities for deep learning techniques in effective and efficient object detection applications. However, due to a huge difference of quality between these standardized dataset and practical raw data, it is still a critical problem on how to maximize utilization of deep learning techniques in practical agriculture applications. Here, we introduce a domain-specific benchmark dataset, called AgriPest, in tiny wild pest recognition and detection, providing the researchers and communities with a standard large-scale dataset of practically wild pest images and annotations, as well as evaluation procedures. During the past seven years, AgriPest captures 49.7K images of four crops containing 14 species of pests by our designed image collection equipment in the field environment. All of the images are manually annotated by agricultural experts with up to 264.7K bounding boxes of locating pests. This paper also offers a detailed analysis of AgriPest where the validation set is split into four types of scenes that are common in practical pest monitoring applications. We explore and evaluate the performance of state-of-the-art deep learning techniques over AgriPest. We believe that the scale, accuracy, and diversity of AgriPest can offer great opportunities to researchers in computer vision as well as pest monitoring applications.