What is ImageNet?
ImageNet is a large database of quality controlled, human-annotated images that help test algorithms that are built to store, retrieve, or annotate multimedia data. In ImageNet’s own words, “ImageNet is an image dataset organized according to the WordNet hierarchy. Each meaningful concept in WordNet, possibly described by multiple words or word phrases, is called a "synonym set" or "synset". There are more than 100,000 synsets in WordNet, [the] majority of them are nouns (80,000+)”.
Applications in Artificial Intelligence
When training AI to recognize images, faces, or just about anything, you need a training data set. Without something like ImageNet, someone will need to manually slog through Google Images for hundreds, if not thousands, of different images of the same noun, such as an eye. This is both tedious and time consuming. ImageNet makes it much faster to collect high-quality training data sets.
