Naive Bees Classifier

Can you identify a bee as a honey bee or a bumble bee? Practice image processing and classification techniques and help researchers seeking to protect pollinators from collapse. #science

$5,000 in prizes
dec 2015
431 joined

The Metis Challenge: Naive Bees Classifier

honey bee bumble bee

Bombus or Apis? You bee the judge.

Metis wants to know: using images from BeeSpotter can you identify a bee as a honey bee or a bumble bee? These bees have different behaviors and appearances, but given the variety of backgrounds, positions, and image resolutions it can be a challenge for machines to tell them apart.

Wild bees are important pollinators and the spread of colony collapse disorder has only made their role more critical. Right now it takes a lot of time and effort for researchers to gather data on wild bees. Using data submitted by citizen scientists, Bee Spotter is making this process easier. However, they still require that experts examine and identify the bee in each image. You're goal is to build an algorithm to help. The starting point is to determine the genus—Apis (honey bee) or Bombus (bumble bee)—based on photographs of the insects.

Competition End Date:

Dec. 3, 2015, 11:59 p.m. UTC

Place Prize Amount
1st $3,000
2nd $1,000
3rd $1,000
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Bee images from Bee Spotter dataset