Danish Fungi 2020 -- Not Just Another Image Recognition Dataset

We introduce a novel fine-grained dataset and benchmark, the Danish Fungi 2020 (DF20). The dataset, constructed from observations submitted to the Danish Fungal Atlas, is unique in its taxonomy-accurate class labels, small number of errors, highly unbalanced long-tailed class distribution, rich observation metadata, and well-defined class hierarchy. DF20 has zero overlap with ImageNet, allowing unbiased comparison of models fine-tuned from publicly available ImageNet checkpoints. The proposed evaluation protocol enables testing the ability to improve classification using metadata -- e.g. precise geographic location, habitat, and substrate, facilitates classifier calibration testing, and finally allows to study the impact of the device settings on the classification performance. Experiments using Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) and the recent Vision Transformers (ViT) show that DF20 presents a challenging task. Interestingly, ViT achieves results superior to CNN baselines with 81.25% accuracy, reducing the CNN error by 13%. A baseline procedure for including metadata into the decision process improves the classification accuracy by more than 3.5 percentage points, reducing the error rate by 20%. The source code for all methods and experiments is available at https://sites.google.com/view/danish-fungi-dataset.