North American Camera Trap Images

Overview

This data set contains 3.7M camera trap images from five locations across the United States, with labels for 28 animal categories, primarily at the species level (for example, the most common labels are cattle, boar, and red deer). Approximately 12% of images are labeled as empty. We have also added bounding box annotations to 8892 images (mostly vehicles and birds).

Citation, license, and contact information

More information about this data set is available in the associated manuscript:

Tabak MA, Norouzzadeh MS, Wolfson DW, Sweeney SJ, VerCauteren KC, Snow NP, Halseth JM, Di Salvo PA, Lewis JS, White MD, Teton B. Machine learning to classify animal species in camera trap images: Applications in ecology. Methods in Ecology and Evolution. 2019 Apr;10(4):585-90.

Please cite this manuscript if you use this data set.

This data set is released under the Community Data License Agreement (permissive variant).

For questions about this data set, contact northamericancameratrapimages@gmail.com.

Data format

Annotations are provided in COCO Camera Traps .json format.

For information about mapping this dataset’s categories to a common taxonomy, see this page.

Downloading the data

Images are available in the following cloud storage folders:

• gs://public-datasets-lila/nacti-unzipped (GCP)
• s3://us-west-2.opendata.source.coop/agentmorris/lila-wildlife/nacti-unzipped (AWS)
• https://lilawildlife.blob.core.windows.net/lila-wildlife/nacti-unzipped (Azure)

Links to a series of zipfiles are also provided below, but – whether you want the whole data set, a specific folder, or a subset of the data (e.g. images for one species) – we recommend checking out our guidelines for accessing images without using giant zipfiles.

GCP links

Azure links

AWS links

Posted by Dan Morris.