A New Dataset Based on Images Taken by Blind People for Testing the Robustness of Image Classification Models Trained for ImageNet Categories

Abstract

Our goal is to improve upon the status quo for designing image classification models trained in one domain that perform well on images from another domain. Complementing existing work in robustness testing, we introduce the first dataset for this purpose which comes from an authentic use case where photographers wanted to learn about the content in their images. We built a new test set using 8,900 images taken by people who are blind for which we collected metadata to indicate the presence versus absence of 200 ImageNet object categories. We call this dataset VizWiz-Classification. We characterize this dataset and how it compares to the mainstream datasets for evaluating how well ImageNet-trained classification models generalize. Finally, we analyze the performance of 100 ImageNet classification models on our new test dataset. Our fine-grained analysis demonstrates that these models struggle on images with quality issues. To enable future extensions to this work, we share our new dataset with evaluation server at: https://VizWiz.org/tasks-and-datasets/image-classification.