Title: Diverse, Difficult, and Odd Instances (D2O): A New Test Set for Object Classification. Abstract: Test sets are an integral part of evaluating models and gauging progress in object
recognition, and more broadly in computer vision and AI. Existing test sets for
object recognition, however, suffer from shortcomings such as bias towards the
ImageNet characteristics and idiosyncrasies (e.g. ImageNet-V2), being limited to
certain types of stimuli (e.g. indoor scenes in ObjectNet), and underestimating
the model performance (e.g. ImageNet-A). To mitigate these problems, here we
introduce a new test set, called D2O, which is sufficiently different from existing
test sets. Images are diverse, unmodified, and representative of real-world scenarios
and cause state-of-the-art models to misclassify them with high confidence. To
emphasize generalization, our dataset by design does not come paired with a
training set. It contains 8,060 images spread across 36 categories, out of which 29
appear in ImageNet. The best Top-1 accuracy on our dataset is around 60% which
is much lower than 91% best Top-1 accuracy on ImageNet. We find that popular
vision APIs perform very poorly in detecting objects over D2O categories such as
“faces”, “cars”, and “cats”. Our dataset also comes with a “miscellaneous” category,
over which we test the image tagging algorithms. Overall, our investigations
demonstrate that the D2O test set has the right level of difficulty and is predictive
of the average-case performance of models. It can challenge object recognition
models for years to come and can spur more research in this fundamental area.
Data and code are publicly available at [Masked].