README.md

Use Builtin Datasets

A dataset can be used by accessing DatasetCatalog for its data, or MetadataCatalog for its metadata (class names, etc). This document explains how to setup the builtin datasets so they can be used by the above APIs. Use Custom Datasets gives a deeper dive on how to use DatasetCatalog and MetadataCatalog, and how to add new datasets to them.

Detectron2 has builtin support for a few datasets. The datasets are assumed to exist in a directory specified by the environment variable DETECTRON2_DATASETS. Under this directory, detectron2 will look for datasets in the structure described below, if needed.

$DETECTRON2_DATASETS/
  coco/
  VOC20{07,12}/

You can set the location for builtin datasets by export DETECTRON2_DATASETS=/path/to/datasets. If left unset, the default is ./datasets relative to your current working directory.

The model zoo contains configs and models that use these builtin datasets.

Expected dataset structure for COCO instance/keypoint detection:

coco/
  annotations/
    instances_{train,val}2017.json
    person_keypoints_{train,val}2017.json
  {train,val}2017/
    # image files that are mentioned in the corresponding json

You can use the 2014 version of the dataset as well.

Some of the builtin tests (dev/run_*_tests.sh) uses a tiny version of the COCO dataset, which you can download with ./datasets/prepare_for_tests.sh.

Expected dataset structure for Pascal VOC:

VOC20{07,12}/
  Annotations/
  ImageSets/
    Main/
      trainval.txt
      test.txt
      # train.txt or val.txt, if you use these splits
  JPEGImages/