The ImageCLEF 2013 Plant Identification Task

International audienceThe ImageCLEF's plant identification task provides a testbed for a system-oriented evaluation of plant identification about 250 species trees and herbaceous plants based on detailed views of leaves, flowers, fruits, stems and bark or some entire views of the plants. Two types of image content are considered: SheetAsBackgroud which contains only leaves in a front of a generally white uniform background, and NaturalBackground which contains the 5 kinds of detailed views with unconstrained conditions, directly photographed on the plant. The main originality of this data is that it was specifically built through a citizen sciences initiative conducted by Tela Botanica, a French social network of amateur and expert botanists. This makes the task closer to the conditions of a real-world application. This overview presents more precisely the resources and assessments of task, summarizes the retrieval approaches employed by the participating groups, and provides an analysis of the main evaluation results. With a total of twelve groups from nine countries and with a total of thirty three runs submitted, involving distinct and original methods, this third year task confirms Image Retrieval community interest for biodiversity and botany, and highlights further challenging studies in plant identification