The PASCAL Visual Object Classes Challenge

2012 (VOC2012) Development Kit

Mark Everingham John Winn

May 18, 2012

Contents
1 Challenge 4

2 Data 4
2.1 Classification/Detection Image Sets . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
2.2 Segmentation Image Sets . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
2.3 Action Classification Image Sets . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
2.4 Person Layout Taster Image Sets . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
2.5 Ground Truth Annotation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
2.6 Segmentation Ground Truth . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
2.7 Person Layout Taster Ground Truth . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
2.8 Action Classification Ground Truth . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10

3 Classification Task 11
3.1 Task . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
3.2 Competitions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
3.3 Submission of Results . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
3.4 Evaluation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
3.4.1 Average Precision (AP) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12

4 Detection Task 12
4.1 Task . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
4.2 Competitions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
4.3 Submission of Results . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
4.4 Evaluation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13

5 Segmentation Task 14
5.1 Task . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
5.2 Competitions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
5.3 Submission of Results . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
5.4 Evaluation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15

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6 Action Classification Task 15
6.1 Task . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
6.2 Competitions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
6.3 Submission of Results . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
6.4 Evaluation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16

7 Boxless Action Classification Taster 16

7.1 Task . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
7.2 Competitions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
7.3 Submission of Results and Evaluation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17

8 Person Layout Taster 17

8.1 Task . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
8.2 Competitions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18
8.3 Submission of Results . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18
8.4 Evaluation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19

9 Development Kit 20
9.1 Installation and Configuration . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20
9.2 Example Code . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21
9.2.1 Example Classifier Implementation . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21
9.2.2 Example Detector Implementation . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21
9.2.3 Example Segmenter Implementation . . . . . . . . . . . . 21
9.2.4 Example Action Implementation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22
9.2.5 Example Boxless Action Implementation . . . . . . . . . . 22
9.2.6 Example Layout Implementation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22
9.3 Non-MATLAB Users . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22

10 Using the Development Kit 22

10.1 Image Sets . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22
10.1.1 Classification/Detection Task Image Sets . . . . . . . . . 22
10.1.2 Classification Task Image Sets . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23
10.1.3 Segmentation Image Sets . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24
10.1.4 Action Classification Image Sets . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24
10.1.5 Action Class Image Sets . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24
10.1.6 Person Layout Taster Image Sets . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25
10.2 Development Kit Functions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26
10.2.1 VOCinit . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26
10.2.2 PASreadrecord(filename) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26
10.2.3 viewanno(imgset) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29
10.3 Classification Functions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30
10.3.1 VOCevalcls(VOCopts,id,cls,draw) . . . . . . . . . . . . 30
10.4 Detection Functions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30
10.4.1 VOCevaldet(VOCopts,id,cls,draw) . . . . . . . . . . . . 30
10.4.2 viewdet(id,cls,onlytp) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30
10.5 Segmentation Functions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30
10.5.1 create segmentations from detections(id,confidence) 30
10.5.2 VOCevalseg(VOCopts,id) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31
10.5.3 VOClabelcolormap(N) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31
10.6 Action Functions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31

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 10.6.1 VOCevalaction(VOCopts,id,cls,draw) . . . . . . . . . . 31
10.7 Layout Functions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31
10.7.1 VOCwritexml(rec,path) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31
10.7.2 VOCevallayout pr(VOCopts,id,draw) . . . . . . . . . . 32

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1 Challenge
The goal of this challenge is to recognize objects from a number of visual object
classes in realistic scenes (i.e. not pre-segmented objects). There are twenty
object classes:
• person
• bird, cat, cow, dog, horse, sheep
• aeroplane, bicycle, boat, bus, car, motorbike, train
• bottle, chair, dining table, potted plant, sofa, tv/monitor
There are five main tasks:
• Classification: For each of the classes predict the presence/absence of at
least one object of that class in a test image.
• Detection: For each of the classes predict the bounding boxes of each
object of that class in a test image (if any).
• Segmentation: For each pixel in a test image, predict the class of the
object containing that pixel or ‘background’ if the pixel does not belong
to one of the twenty specified classes.
• Action Classification: For each of the action classes predict if a specified
person (indicated by their bounding box) in a test image is performing
the corresponding action. There are ten action classes:
– jumping; phoning; playing a musical instrument; reading; riding a
bicycle or motorcycle; riding a horse; running; taking a photograph;
using a computer; walking
In addition, some people are performing the action “other” (none of the
above) and act as distractors.
• Large Scale Recognition: This task is run by the ImageNet organizers.
Further details can be found at their website: [Link]
org/challenges/LSVRC/2012/index.
In addition, there are two “taster” tasks:
• Boxless Action Classification: For each of the action classes predict if a
specified person in a test image is performing the corresponding action.
The person is indicated only by a single point lying somewhere on their
body, rather than by a tight bounding box.
• Person Layout: For each ‘person’ object in a test image (indicated by
a bounding box of the person), predict the presence/absence of parts
(head/hands/feet), and the bounding boxes of those parts.

2 Data
The VOC2012 data is released in two phases: (i) training and validation data
with annotation is released with this development kit; (ii) test data without
annotation is released at a later date.

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 2.1 Classification/Detection Image Sets
For the classification and detection tasks there are four sets of images provided:
train: Training data
val: Validation data (suggested). The validation data may be used as addi-
tional training data (see below).
trainval: The union of train and val.
test: Test data. The test set is not provided in the development kit. It will be
released in good time before the deadline for submission of results.
Table 1 summarizes the number of objects and images (containing at least
one object of a given class) for each class and image set. The data has been split
into 50% for training/validation and 50% for testing. The distributions of images
and objects by class are approximately equal across the training/validation and
test sets.
Note that the 2012 data for the main classification/detection tasks is the
same as the 2011 data – no additional images have been annotated. The as-
signment of images to training/test sets has not been changed. The dataset
includes images from the 2008–2011 datasets, for which no test set annotation
has been released.

2.2 Segmentation Image Sets

For the segmentation task, corresponding image sets are provided as in the
classification/detection tasks. To increase the amount of data, the training and
validation image sets include images from the 2007–2011 segmentation tasks.
The test set contains only 2008–2011 images (i.e. those for which no annotation
has been released), and is a subset of the test set for the main tasks for which
pixel-wise segmentations have been prepared. Table 2 summarizes the number of
objects and images (containing at least one object of a given class) for each class
and image set, for the combined 2007–2012 data. In addition to the segmented
images for training and validation, participants are free to use the un-segmented
training/validation images supplied for the main classification/detection tasks,
and any annotation provided for the main challenge e.g. bounding boxes.

2.3 Action Classification Image Sets

For the action classification task, corresponding image sets are provided as in
the classification/detection tasks. The same images are used for both the action
classification task (where a person is indicated by a bounding box) and the
boxless action classification taster (where a person is indicated by a point lying
somewhere on the body). Each person has been annotated with the set of
actions they are performing from the set {jumping, phoning, playing a musical
instrument, reading, riding a bicycle or motorcycle, riding a horse, running,
taking a photograph, using a computer, walking}. Note that actions are not
mutually exclusive, for example a person may simultaneously be walking and
phoning. Additionally, there are people labeled with the action ‘other’, meaning
none of the above actions are being performed. These examples make serve as
distractors to the main ten action classes.

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Table 1: Statistics of the main image sets. Object statistics list only the ‘non-
difficult’ objects used in the evaluation.
train val trainval test
img obj img obj img obj img obj
Aeroplane 327 432 343 433 670 865 – –
Bicycle 268 353 284 358 552 711 – –
Bird 395 560 370 559 765 1119 – –
Boat 260 426 248 424 508 850 – –
Bottle 365 629 341 630 706 1259 – –
Bus 213 292 208 301 421 593 – –
Car 590 1013 571 1004 1161 2017 – –
Cat 539 605 541 612 1080 1217 – –
Chair 566 1178 553 1176 1119 2354 – –
Cow 151 290 152 298 303 588 – –
Diningtable 269 304 269 305 538 609 – –
Dog 632 756 654 759 1286 1515 – –
Horse 237 350 245 360 482 710 – –
Motorbike 265 357 261 356 526 713 – –
Person 1994 4194 2093 4372 4087 8566 – –
Pottedplant 269 484 258 489 527 973 – –
Sheep 171 400 154 413 325 813 – –
Sofa 257 281 250 285 507 566 – –
Train 273 313 271 315 544 628 – –
Tvmonitor 290 392 285 392 575 784 – –
Total 5717 13609 5823 13841 11540 27450 – –

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 Table 2: Statistics of the segmentation image sets.
train val trainval test
img obj img obj img obj img obj
Aeroplane 88 108 90 110 178 218 – –
Bicycle 65 94 79 103 144 197 – –
Bird 105 137 103 140 208 277 – –
Boat 78 124 72 108 150 232 – –
Bottle 87 195 96 162 183 357 – –
Bus 78 121 74 116 152 237 – –
Car 128 209 127 249 255 458 – –
Cat 131 154 119 132 250 286 – –
Chair 148 303 123 245 271 548 – –
Cow 64 152 71 132 135 284 – –
Diningtable 82 86 75 82 157 168 – –
Dog 121 149 128 150 249 299 – –
Horse 68 100 79 104 147 204 – –
Motorbike 81 101 76 103 157 204 – –
Person 442 868 445 865 887 1733 – –
Pottedplant 82 151 85 171 167 322 – –
Sheep 63 155 57 153 120 308 – –
Sofa 93 103 90 106 183 209 – –
Train 83 96 84 93 167 189 – –
Tvmonitor 84 101 74 98 158 199 – –
Total 1464 3507 1449 3422 2913 6929 – –

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 Table 3: Statistics of the action classification image sets.

train val trainval test

img obj img obj img obj img obj
Jumping 204 247 201 248 405 495 – –
Phoning 223 228 221 229 444 457 – –
Playinginstrument 230 309 229 310 459 619 – –
Reading 232 264 231 266 463 530 – –
Ridingbike 201 289 199 289 400 578 – –
Ridinghorse 205 266 206 268 411 534 – –
Running 156 280 154 281 310 561 – –
Takingphoto 209 227 205 229 414 456 – –
Usingcomputer 199 237 196 239 395 476 – –
Walking 191 298 195 299 386 597 – –
Other 402 521 397 522 799 1043 – –
Total 2296 3134 2292 3144 4588 6278 – –

Table 4: Statistics of the person layout taster image sets. Object statistics list
only the ‘person’ objects for which layout information (parts) is present.
train val trainval test
img obj img obj img obj img obj
Person 315 425 294 425 609 850 – –

The image sets are disjoint from those of the classification/detection tasks
and person layout taster task. Note that they are not fully annotated – only
‘person’ objects forming part of the training and test sets are annotated, and
there may be unannotated people in the images. Table 3 summarizes the action
statistics for each image set.

2.4 Person Layout Taster Image Sets

For the person layout taster task, corresponding image sets are provided as in
the classification/detection tasks. A person is indicated by a bounding box, and
each person has been annotated with part layout (head, hands, feet). Note that
the 2012 person layout dataset is the same as the corresponding 2011 dataset
– no additional images have been annotated. The assignment of images to
training/test sets has not been changed. The dataset includes images from the
2008–2011 datasets, for which no test set annotation has been released, and the
test set is disjoint from that for the main classification/detection tasks. Table 4
summarizes the number of ‘person’ objects annotated with layout for each image
set.
Note that the person layout images in VOC2012 are not fully annotated –
only a subset of people have been annotated, and no other objects – for example
an image containing two people and a car may only have one person annotated.

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2.5 Ground Truth Annotation
Objects of the twenty classes listed above are annotated in the ground truth.
For each object, the following annotation is present:
• class: the object class e.g. ‘car’ or ‘bicycle’
• bounding box: an axis-aligned rectangle specifying the extent of the
object visible in the image.
• view: ‘frontal’, ‘rear’, ‘left’ or ‘right’. The views are subjectively marked
to indicate the view of the ‘bulk’ of the object. Some objects have no view
specified.
• ‘truncated’: an object marked as ‘truncated’ indicates that the bounding
box specified for the object does not correspond to the full extent of the
object e.g. an image of a person from the waist up, or a view of a car
extending outside the image.
• ‘occluded’: an object marked as ‘occluded’ indicates that a significant
portion of the object within the bounding box is occluded by another
object.
• ‘difficult’: an object marked as ‘difficult’ indicates that the object is con-
sidered difficult to recognize, for example an object which is clearly visible
but unidentifiable without substantial use of context. Objects marked as
difficult are currently ignored in the evaluation of the challenge.
In preparing the ground truth, annotators were given a detailed list of guidelines
on how to complete the annotation. These are available on the main challenge
web-site [1].
Note that for the action classification images, only people have been an-
notated, and only the bounding box and a reference point on the person is
available. Note also that for these images the annotation is not necessarily
complete i.e. there may be unannotated people.

2.6 Segmentation Ground Truth

For the segmentation image sets, each image has two corresponding types of
ground truth segmentation provided:
• class segmentation: each pixel is labelled with the ground truth class or
background.
• object segmentation: each pixel is labelled with an object number (from
which the class can be obtained) or background.
Figure 1 gives an example of these two types of segmentation for one of the
training set images. The ground truth segmentations are provided to a high de-
gree of accuracy, but are not pixel accurate, as this would have greatly extended
the time required to gather these segmentations. Instead, they were labelled so
that a bordering region with a width of five pixels may contain either object
or background. Bordering regions are marked with a ‘void’ label (index 255),
indicating that the contained pixels can be any class including background. The

9
 a. b. c.

Figure 1: Example of segmentation ground truth. a. Training image b. Class

segmentation showing background, car, horse and person labels. The cream-
colored ‘void’ label is also used in border regions and to mask difficult objects. c.
Object segmentation where individual object instances are separately labelled.

void label is also used to mask out ambiguous, difficult or heavily occluded ob-
jects and also to label regions of the image containing objects too small to be
marked, such as crowds of people. All void pixels are ignored when comput-
ing segmentation accuracies and should be treated as unlabelled pixels during
training.
In addition to the ground truth segmentations given, participants are free
to use any of the ground truth annotation for the classification/detection tasks
e.g. bounding boxes.

2.7 Person Layout Taster Ground Truth

For the person layout taster task, ‘person’ objects are additionally annotated
with three ‘parts’:

• head – one per person

• hand – zero, one, or two per person

• foot – zero, one, or two per person

For each annotated person, the presence or absence of each part is listed, and for
each part present, the bounding box is specified. The test images for the person
layout taster are disjoint from the other image sets. There are no ‘difficult’
objects. As noted above, the layout taster ground truth is incomplete – only
people are annotated, and there may be unannotated people in an image.

2.8 Action Classification Ground Truth

For the action classification task, ‘person’ objects are annotated with bounding
box, a reference point lying somewhere on the body, and a set of flags, one
per action class e.g. ‘phoning’ or ‘walking’. For each action the flag indicates if

10
the person is performing the corresponding action. Note that actions are not
mutually exclusive, for example a person may simultaneously be walking and
phoning. The ‘other’ action is mutually exclusive to all other actions. The
image sets are disjoint from the classification/detection and layout taster tasks.
There are no ‘difficult’ objects.

3 Classification Task
3.1 Task
For each of the twenty object classes predict the presence/absence of at least
one object of that class in a test image. The output from your system should be
a real-valued confidence of the object’s presence so that a precision/recall curve
can be drawn. Participants may choose to tackle all, or any subset of object
classes, for example “cars only” or “motorbikes and cars”.

3.2 Competitions
Two competitions are defined according to the choice of training data: (i) taken
from the VOC trainval data provided, or (ii) from any source excluding the
VOC test data provided:
No. Task Training data Test data
1 Classification trainval test
2 Classification any but VOC test test
In competition 1, any annotation provided in the VOC train and val sets
may be used for training, for example bounding boxes or particular views e.g.
‘frontal’ or ‘left’. Participants are not permitted to perform additional manual
annotation of either training or test data.
In competition 2, any source of training data may be used except the provided
test images. Researchers who have pre-built systems trained on other data are
particularly encouraged to participate. The test data includes images from
“flickr” ([Link]); this source of images may not be used for training.
Participants who have acquired images from flickr for training must submit them
to the organizers to check for overlap with the test set.

3.3 Submission of Results

A separate text file of results should be generated for each competition (1 or
2) and each class e.g. ‘car’. Each line should contain a single identifier and the
confidence output by the classifier, separated by a space, for example:

comp1_cls_test_car.txt:
...
2009_000001 0.056313
2009_000002 0.127031
2009_000009 0.287153
...

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Greater confidence values signify greater confidence that the image contains
an object of the class of interest. The example classifier implementation (sec-
tion 9.2.1) includes code for generating a results file in the required format.

3.4 Evaluation
The classification task will be judged by the precision/recall curve. The principal
quantitative measure used will be the average precision (AP). Example code for
computing the precision/recall and AP measure is provided in the development
kit. See also section 3.4.1.
Images which contain only objects marked as ‘difficult’ (section 2.5) are
currently ignored by the evaluation. The final evaluation may include separate
results including such “difficult” images, depending on the submitted results.
Participants are expected to submit a single set of results per method em-
ployed. Participants who have investigated several algorithms may submit one
result per method. Changes in algorithm parameters do not constitute a differ-
ent method – all parameter tuning must be conducted using the training and
validation data alone.

3.4.1 Average Precision (AP)

The computation of the average precision (AP) measure was changed in 2010
to improve precision and ability to measure differences between methods with
low AP. It is computed as follows:
1. Compute a version of the measured precision/recall curve with precision
monotonically decreasing, by setting the precision for recall r to the max-
imum precision obtained for any recall r′ ≥ r.
2. Compute the AP as the area under this curve by numerical integration.
No approximation is involved since the curve is piecewise constant.
Note that prior to 2010 the AP is computed by sampling the monotonically
decreasing curve at a fixed set of uniformly-spaced recall values 0, 0.1, 0.2, . . . , 1.
By contrast, VOC2010–2012 effectively samples the curve at all unique recall
values.

4 Detection Task
4.1 Task
For each of the twenty classes predict the bounding boxes of each object of
that class in a test image (if any). Each bounding box should be output with
an associated real-valued confidence of the detection so that a precision/recall
curve can be drawn. Participants may choose to tackle all, or any subset of
object classes, for example “cars only” or “motorbikes and cars”.

4.2 Competitions
Two competitions are defined according to the choice of training data: (i) taken
from the VOC trainval data provided, or (ii) from any source excluding the
VOC test data provided:

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 No. Task Training data Test data
3 Detection trainval test
4 Detection any but VOC test test
In competition 3, any annotation provided in the VOC train and val sets
may be used for training, for example bounding boxes or particular views e.g.
‘frontal’ or ‘left’. Participants are not permitted to perform additional manual
annotation of either training or test data.
In competition 4, any source of training data may be used except the provided
test images. Researchers who have pre-built systems trained on other data are
particularly encouraged to participate. The test data includes images from
“flickr” ([Link]); this source of images may not be used for training.
Participants who have acquired images from flickr for training must submit them
to the organizers to check for overlap with the test set.

4.3 Submission of Results

A separate text file of results should be generated for each competition (3 or 4)
and each class e.g. ‘car’. Each line should be a detection output by the detector
in the following format:
<image identifier> <confidence> <left> <top> <right> <bottom>
where (left,top)-(right,bottom) defines the bounding box of the detected
object. The top-left pixel in the image has coordinates (1, 1). Greater confidence
values signify greater confidence that the detection is correct. An example file
excerpt is shown below. Note that for the image 2009 000032, multiple objects
are detected:
comp3_det_test_car.txt:
...
2009_000026 0.949297 172.000000 233.000000 191.000000 248.000000
2009_000032 0.013737 1.000000 147.000000 114.000000 242.000000
2009_000032 0.013737 1.000000 134.000000 94.000000 168.000000
2009_000035 0.063948 455.000000 229.000000 491.000000 243.000000
...
The example detector implementation (section 9.2.2) includes code for generat-
ing a results file in the required format.

4.4 Evaluation
The detection task will be judged by the precision/recall curve. The principal
quantitative measure used will be the average precision (AP) (see section 3.4.1).
Example code for computing the precision/recall and AP measure is provided
in the development kit.
Detections are considered true or false positives based on the area of overlap
with ground truth bounding boxes. To be considered a correct detection, the
area of overlap ao between the predicted bounding box Bp and ground truth
bounding box Bgt must exceed 50% by the formula:
area(Bp ∩ Bgt )
ao = (1)
area(Bp ∪ Bgt )

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Example code for computing this overlap measure is provided in the develop-
ment kit. Multiple detections of the same object in an image are considered
false detections e.g. 5 detections of a single object is counted as 1 correct detec-
tion and 4 false detections – it is the responsibility of the participant’s system
to filter multiple detections from its output.
Objects marked as ‘difficult’ (section 2.5) are currently ignored by the evalua-
tion. The final evaluation may include separate results including such “difficult”
images, depending on the submitted results.
Participants are expected to submit a single set of results per method em-
ployed. Participants who have investigated several algorithms may submit one
result per method. Changes in algorithm parameters do not constitute a differ-
ent method – all parameter tuning must be conducted using the training and
validation data alone.

5 Segmentation Task
5.1 Task
For each test image pixel, predict the class of the object containing that pixel or
’background’ if the pixel does not belong to one of the twenty specified classes.
The output from your system should be an indexed image with each pixel index
indicating the number of the inferred class (1-20) or zero, indicating background.

5.2 Competitions
Two competitions are defined according to the choice of training data: (i) taken
from the VOC trainval data provided, or (ii) from any source excluding the
VOC test data provided:

No. Task Training data Test data

5 Segmentation trainval test
6 Segmentation any but VOC test test

For competition 5, any annotation provided in the VOC train and val
sets may be used for training, for example segmentation, bounding boxes or
particular views e.g. ‘frontal’ or ‘left’. However, if training uses annotation of
any images other than the segmented training images, this must be reported as
part of the submission (see below) since this allows a considerably larger training
set. Participants are not permitted to perform additional manual annotation of
either training or test data.
For competition 6, any source of training data may be used except the pro-
vided test images.

5.3 Submission of Results

Submission of results should be as collections of PNG format indexed image files,
one per test image, with pixel indices from 0 to 20. The PNG color map should
be the same as the color map used in the provided training and validation anno-
tation (MATLAB users can use VOClabelcolormap – see section 10.5.3). The
example segmenter implementation (section 9.2.3) includes code for generating

14
results in the required format. Participants may choose to include segmenta-
tions for only a subset of the 20 classes in which case they will be evaluated on
only the included classes.
For competition 5, along with the submitted image files, participants must
also state whether their method used segmentation training data only or both
segmentation and bounding box training data. This information will be used
when analysing and presenting the competition results.

5.4 Evaluation
Each segmentation competition will be judged by average segmentation accuracy
across the twenty classes and the background class. The segmentation accuracy
for a class will be assessed using the intersection/union metric, defined as the
number of correctly labelled pixels of that class, divided by the number of pixels
labelled with that class in either the ground truth labelling or the inferred
labelling. Equivalently, the accuracy is given by the equation,
true positives
segmentation accuracy =
true positives + false positives + false negatives
Code is provided to compute segmentation accuracies for each class, and the
overall average accuracy (see section 10.5.2).
Participants are expected to submit a single set of results per method em-
ployed. Participants who have investigated several algorithms may submit one
result per method. Changes in algorithm parameters do not constitute a differ-
ent method – all parameter tuning must be conducted using the training and
validation data alone.

6 Action Classification Task

6.1 Task
For each of the ten action classes predict if a specified person (indicated by
their bounding box) in a test image is performing the corresponding action.
The output from your system should be a real-valued confidence that the action
is being performed so that a precision/recall curve can be drawn. Participants
may choose to tackle all, or any subset of action classes, for example “walking
only” or “walking and running”. Note that instances of the ‘other’ action class
are included in the training/test sets as negative examples; a classifier targeting
the ‘other’ action class is not required.

6.2 Competitions
Two competitions are defined according to the choice of training data: (i) taken
from the VOC trainval data provided, or (ii) from any source excluding the
VOC test data provided:
No. Task Training data Test data
9 Action Classification trainval test
10 Action Classification any but VOC test test

15
 In competition 9, any annotation provided in the VOC train and val sets
may be used for training. Participants may use images and annotation for
any of the competitions for training e.g. horse bounding boxes/segmentation
to learn ‘ridinghorse’. Participants are not permitted to perform additional
manual annotation of either training or test data.
In competition 10, any source of training data may be used except the pro-
vided test images. Researchers who have pre-built systems trained on other
data are particularly encouraged to participate. The test data includes images
from “flickr” ([Link]); this source of images may not be used for
training. Participants who have acquired images from flickr for training must
submit them to the organizers to check for overlap with the test set.

6.3 Submission of Results

A separate text file of results should be generated for each competition (9 or
10) and each action class e.g. ‘phoning’. Each line should contain a single image
identifier, object index, and the confidence output by the classifier, separated
by a space, for example:
comp9_action_test_phoning.txt:
...
2010_006107 1 0.241236
2010_006107 2 0.758739
2010_006108 1 0.125374
...
The image identifier and object index specify the ‘person’ object to which the
output corresponds; these are provided in the corresponding image sets. Greater
confidence values signify greater confidence that the person is performing the
action of interest. The example implementation (section 9.2.4) includes code
for generating a results file in the required format.

6.4 Evaluation
The action classification task will be judged by the precision/recall curve. The
principal quantitative measure used will be the average precision (AP) (see
section 3.4.1). Example code for computing the precision/recall and AP measure
is provided in the development kit.
Participants are expected to submit a single set of results per method em-
ployed. Participants who have investigated several algorithms may submit one
result per method. Changes in algorithm parameters do not constitute a differ-
ent method – all parameter tuning must be conducted using the training and
validation data alone.

7 Boxless Action Classification Taster

7.1 Task
The boxless action classification task is the same as the action classification
task, except that the person to be classified in a test image is indicated only by

16
a single point lying somewhere on their body, instead of a tight bounding box.
The aim is to evaluate the efficacy of action classification methods when they
are not provided with “precise” information about the extent of the person (in
the form a tight bounding box), as might be the case where the input to the
method is obtained from a generic human detector.
At training time, participants may use any of the annotation provided in
the VOC dataset e.g. both reference point and bounding box for a person. At
test time, a method must only use the reference point provided to identify the
person to be classified – the bounding box present in the test image annotation
must not be used.

7.2 Competitions
Two competitions are defined according to the choice of training data: (i) taken
from the VOC trainval data provided, or (ii) from any source excluding the
VOC test data provided:
No. Task Training data Test data
11 Action Classification trainval test (point only)
12 Action Classification any but VOC test test (point only)
In competition 11, any annotation provided in the VOC train and val
sets may be used for training. Participants may use images and annotation for
any of the competitions for training e.g. horse bounding boxes/segmentation
to learn ‘ridinghorse’. Participants are not permitted to perform additional
manual annotation of either training or test data.
In competition 12, any source of training data may be used except the pro-
vided test images. Researchers who have pre-built systems trained on other
data are particularly encouraged to participate. The test data includes images
from “flickr” ([Link]); this source of images may not be used for
training. Participants who have acquired images from flickr for training must
submit them to the organizers to check for overlap with the test set.
Note that in both competitions the only annotation in the test images that
may be used is the reference point for a person indicating which person is to be
classified. It is not allowed to use the bounding boxes in the test annotation.

7.3 Submission of Results and Evaluation

Results should submitted in the same format as for the action classification
task (using bounding boxes), using competition numbers 11 or 12 to identify
that only reference points have been used for the test data. The taster will be
evaluated in the same way as the action classification task.

8 Person Layout Taster

8.1 Task
For each ‘person’ object in a test image (their bounding box is provided) pre-
dict the presence/absence of parts (head/hands/feet), and the bounding boxes

17
of those parts. The prediction for a person layout should be output with an as-
sociated real-valued confidence of the layout so that a precision/recall curve can
be drawn. Only a single estimate of layout should be output for each person.
The success of the layout prediction depends both on: (i) a correct prediction
of parts present/absent (e.g. is the hand visible or occluded); (ii) a correct
prediction of bounding boxes for the visible parts.

8.2 Competitions
Two competitions are defined according to the choice of training data: (i) taken
from the VOC trainval data provided, or (ii) from any source excluding the
VOC test data provided:
No. Task Training data Test data
7 Layout trainval test
8 Layout any but VOC test test
In competition 7, any annotation provided in the VOC train and val sets
may be used for training, for example bounding boxes or particular views e.g.
‘frontal’ or ‘left’. Participants are not permitted to perform additional manual
annotation of either training or test data.
In competition 8, any source of training data may be used except the provided
test images. Researchers who have pre-built systems trained on other data are
particularly encouraged to participate. The test data includes images from
“flickr” ([Link]); this source of images may not be used for training.
Participants who have acquired images from flickr for training must submit them
to the organizers to check for overlap with the test set.

8.3 Submission of Results

To support the hierarchical (person+parts) nature of this task, an XML format
has been adopted for submission of results. A separate XML file of results
should be generated for each competition (6 or 7). The overall format should
follow:
<results>
<layout>
... layout estimate 1 ...
</layout>
<layout>
... layout estimate 2 ...
</layout>
</results>
Each detection is represented by a <layout> element. The order of detections
is not important. An example detection is shown here:
<layout>
<image>2009_000183</image>
<object>1</object>
<confidence>-1189</confidence>
<part>

18
 <class>head</class>
<bndbox>
<xmin>191</xmin>
<ymin>25</ymin>
<xmax>323</xmax>
<ymax>209</ymax>
</bndbox>
</part>
<part>
<class>hand</class>
<bndbox>
<xmin>393</xmin>
<ymin>206</ymin>
<xmax>488</xmax>
<ymax>300</ymax>
</bndbox>
</part>
<part>
<class>hand</class>
<bndbox>
<xmin>1</xmin>
<ymin>148</ymin>
<xmax>132</xmax>
<ymax>329</ymax>
</bndbox>
</part>
</layout>
The <image> element specifies the image identifier. The <object> specifies the
index of the object to which the layout relates (the first object in the image has
index 1) and should match that provided in the image set files (section 10.1.6).
The <confidence> element specifies the confidence of the layout estimate, used
to generate a precision/recall curve as in the detection task.
Each <part> element specifies the detection of a particular part of the per-
son i.e. head/hand/foot. If the part is predicted to be absent/invisible, the
corresponding element should be omitted. For each part, the <class> element
specifies the type of part: head, hand or foot. The <bndbox> element specifies
the predicted bounding box for that part; bounding boxes are specified in image
co-ordinates and need not be contained in the provided person bounding box.
To ease creation of the required XML results file for MATLAB users, a
function is included in the development kit to convert MATLAB structures
to XML. See the VOCwritexml function (section 10.7.1). The example person
layout implementation (section 9.2.6) includes code for generating a results file
in the required format.

8.4 Evaluation
The person layout task will principally be judged by how well each part in-
dividually can be predicted. For each of the part types (head/hands/feet) a
precision/recall curve will be computed, using the confidence supplied with the

19
person layout to determine the ranking. A prediction of a part is considered
true or false according to the overlap test, as used in the detection challenge, i.e.
for a true prediction the bounding box of the part overlaps the ground truth by
at least 50%. For each part type, the principal quantitative measure used will
be the average precision (AP) (see section 3.4.1). Example code for computing
the precision/recall curves and AP measure is provided in the development kit.

Invitation to propose evaluation schemes. We invite participants to pro-

pose additional evaluation schemes for the person layout task. In particular, we
are interested in schemes which (i) evaluate accuracy of complete layout predic-
tions; (ii) incorporate the notion of ranking of results by confidence. If you have
a successful layout prediction method and insight please propose promising eval-
uation techniques in the form of (i) motivation and explanation; (ii) MATLAB
implementation compatible with the VOC results format.

9 Development Kit
The development kit is packaged in a single gzipped tar file containing MATLAB
code and (this) documentation. The images, annotation, and lists specifying
training/validation sets for the challenge are provided in a separate archive
which can be obtained via the VOC web pages [1].

9.1 Installation and Configuration

The simplest installation is achieved by placing the development kit and chal-
lenge databases in a single location. After untarring the development kit, down-
load the challenge image database and untar into the same directory, resulting
in the following directory structure:
VOCdevkit/ % development kit
VOCdevkit/VOCcode/ % VOC utility code
VOCdevkit/results/VOC2012/ % your results on VOC2012
VOCdevkit/local/ % example code temp dirs
VOCdevkit/VOC2012/ImageSets % image sets
VOCdevkit/VOC2012/Annotations % annotation files
VOCdevkit/VOC2012/JPEGImages % images
VOCdevkit/VOC2012/SegmentationObject % segmentations by object
VOCdevkit/VOC2012/SegmentationClass % segmentations by class
If you set the current directory in MATLAB to the VOCdevkit directory you
should be able to run the example functions:
• example classifier

• example detector
• example segmenter

• example action
• example action nobb

20
 • example layout
If desired, you can store the code, images/annotation, and results in separate
directories, for example you might want to store the image data in a common
group location. To specify the locations of the image/annotation, results, and
working directories, edit the VOCinit.m file, e.g.
% change this path to point to your copy of the PASCAL VOC data
[Link]=’/homes/group/VOCdata/’;

% change this path to a writable directory for your results

[Link]=’/homes/me/VOCresults/’;

% change this path to a writable local directory for the example code
[Link]=’/tmp/’;
Note that in developing your own code you need to include the VOCdevkit/VOCcode
directory in your MATLAB path, e.g.
>> addpath /homes/me/code/VOCdevkit/VOCcode

9.2 Example Code

Example implementations are provided for all tasks. The aim of these (minimal)
implementations is solely to demonstrate use of the code in the development kit.

9.2.1 Example Classifier Implementation

The file example classifier.m contains a complete implementation of the clas-
sification task. For each VOC object class a simple classifier is trained on the
train set; the classifier is then applied to the val set and the output saved to
a results file in the format required by the challenge; a precision/recall curve is
plotted and the ‘average precision’ (AP) measure displayed.

9.2.2 Example Detector Implementation

The file example detector.m contains a complete implementation of the de-
tection task. For each VOC object class a simple (and not very successful!)
detector is trained on the train set; the detector is then applied to the val set
and the output saved to a results file in the format required by the challenge;
a precision/recall curve is plotted and the ‘average precision’ (AP) measure
displayed.

9.2.3 Example Segmenter Implementation

An example segmenter is provided which converts detection results into seg-
mentation results, using create segmentations from detections (described
below). For example:
>> example_detector;
>> example_segmenter;
This runs the example detector, converts the detections into segmentations and
displays a table of per-class segmentation accuracies, along with an overall av-
erage accuracy.

21
9.2.4 Example Action Implementation
The file example action.m contains a complete implementation of the action
classification task. For each VOC action class a simple classifier is trained on
the train set; the classifier is then applied to all specified ‘person’ objects in
the val set and the output saved to a results file in the format required by the
challenge; a precision/recall curve is plotted and the ‘average precision’ (AP)
measure displayed.

9.2.5 Example Boxless Action Implementation

The file example action nobb.m contains a complete implementation of the
boxless action classification task, using only the reference point annotation of
people in the test images (no bounding boxes). For each VOC action class a
simple classifier is trained on the train set; the classifier is then applied to all
specified ‘person’ objects in the val set and the output saved to a results file
in the format required by the challenge; a precision/recall curve is plotted and
the ‘average precision’ (AP) measure displayed.

9.2.6 Example Layout Implementation

The file example layout.m contains a complete implementation of the person
layout task. A simple (and not very successful!) layout predictor is trained on
the train set; the layout predictor is then applied to the val set and the output
saved to a results file in the format required by the challenge; a precision/recall
curve is plotted and the ‘average precision’ (AP) measure displayed.

9.3 Non-MATLAB Users

For non-MATLAB users, the file formats used for the VOC2012 data should be
straightforward to use in other environments. Image sets (see below) are vanilla
text files. Annotation files are XML format and should be readable by any
standard XML parser. Images are stored in JPEG format, and segmentation
ground truth in PNG format.

10 Using the Development Kit

The development kit provides functions for loading annotation data. Example
code for computing precision/recall curves and segmentation accuracy, and for
viewing annotation is also provided.

10.1 Image Sets

10.1.1 Classification/Detection Task Image Sets
The VOC2012/ImageSets/Main/ directory contains text files specifying lists of
images for the main classification/detection tasks.
The files [Link], [Link], [Link] and [Link] list the im-
age identifiers for the corresponding image sets (training, validation, train-
ing+validation and testing). Each line of the file contains a single image iden-

22
tifier. The following MATLAB code reads the image list into a cell array of
strings:
imgset=’train’;
ids=textread(sprintf([Link],imgset),’%s’);
For a given image identifier ids{i}, the corresponding image and annotation
file paths can be produced thus:
imgpath=sprintf([Link],ids{i});
annopath=sprintf([Link],ids{i});
Note that the image sets used are the same for all classes. For each competition,
participants are expected to provide output for all images in the test set.

10.1.2 Classification Task Image Sets

To simplify matters for participants tackling only the classification task, class-
specific image sets with per-image ground truth are also provided. The file
VOC2012/ImageSets/Main/<class> <imgset>.txt contains image identifiers and
ground truth for a particular class and image set, for example the file car [Link]
applies to the ‘car’ class and train image set.
Each line of the file contains a single image identifier and ground truth label,
separated by a space, for example:
...
2009_000040 -1
2009_000042 -1
2009_000052 1
...
The following MATLAB code reads the image list into a cell array of strings
and the ground truth label into a corresponding vector:
imgset=’train’;
cls=’car’;
[ids,gt]=textread(sprintf([Link], ...
cls,imgset),’%s %d’);
There are three ground truth labels:
-1: Negative: The image contains no objects of the class of interest. A classi-
fier should give a ‘negative’ output.
1: Positive: The image contains at least one object of the class of interest.
A classifier should give a ‘positive’ output.
0: “Difficult”: The image contains only objects of the class of interest marked
as ‘difficult’.
The “difficult” label indicates that all objects of the class of interest have
been annotated as “difficult”, for example an object which is clearly visible but
difficult to recognize without substantial use of context. Currently the eval-
uation ignores such images, contributing nothing to the precision/recall curve
or AP measure. The final evaluation may include separate results including
such “difficult” images, depending on the submitted results. Participants are
free to omit these images from training or include as either positive or negative
examples.

23
10.1.3 Segmentation Image Sets
The VOC2012/ImageSets/Segmentation/ directory contains text files specify-
ing lists of images for the segmentation task.
The files [Link], [Link], [Link] and [Link] list the im-
age identifiers for the corresponding image sets (training, validation, train-
ing+validation and testing). Each line of the file contains a single image iden-
tifier. The following MATLAB code reads the image list into a cell array of
strings:
imgset=’train’;
ids=textread(sprintf([Link],imgset),’%s’);
For a given image identifier ids{i}, file paths for the corresponding image,
annotation, segmentation by object instance and segmentation by class can be
produced thus:
imgpath=sprintf([Link],ids{i});
annopath=sprintf([Link],ids{i});
clssegpath=sprintf([Link],ids{i});
objsegpath=sprintf([Link],ids{i});
Participants are expected to provide output for all images in the test set.

10.1.4 Action Classification Image Sets

The VOC2012/ImageSets/Action/ directory contains text files specifying lists
of images and ‘person’ objects for the action classification tasks.
The files [Link], [Link], [Link] and [Link] list the im-
age identifiers for the corresponding image sets (training, validation, train-
ing+validation and testing). Each line of the file contains a single image iden-
tifier. The following MATLAB code reads the image list into a cell array of
strings:
imgset=’train’;
ids=textread(sprintf([Link],imgset),’%s’);
For a given image identifier ids{i}, the corresponding image and annotation
file paths can be produced thus:
imgpath=sprintf([Link],ids{i});
annopath=sprintf([Link],ids{i});
Note that the image sets used are the same for all action classes. For each
competition, participants are expected to provide output for all ‘person’ objects
in each image of the test set.

10.1.5 Action Class Image Sets

To simplify matters for participants tackling the action classification task, ac-
tion class-specific image sets with per-object ground truth are also provided.
The file VOC2012/ImageSets/Action/<class> <imgset>.txt contains image
identifiers, object indices and ground truth for a particular action class and im-
age set, for example the file phoning [Link] applies to the ‘phoning’ action
class and train image set.

24
 Each line of the file contains a single image identifier, single object index,
and ground truth label, separated by a space, for example:
...
2010_006215 1 1
2010_006217 1 -1
2010_006217 2 -1
...

The following MATLAB code reads the image identifiers into a cell array
of strings, the object indices into a vector, and the ground truth label into a
corresponding vector:
imgset=’train’; cls=’phoning’;
[imgids,objids,gt]=textread(sprintf([Link],
cls,imgset),’%s %d %d’);

The annotation for the object (bounding box, reference point and actions)
can then be obtained using the image identifier and object index:

rec=PASreadrecord(sprintf([Link],imgids{i}));
obj=[Link](objids{i});

There are two ground truth labels:

-1: Negative: The person is not performing the action of interest. A classifier
should give a ‘negative’ output.

1: Positive: The person is performing the action of interest. A classifier

should give a ‘positive’ output.

10.1.6 Person Layout Taster Image Sets

The VOC2012/ImageSets/Layout/ directory contains text files specifying lists
of image for the person layout taster task.
The files [Link], [Link], [Link] and [Link] list the im-
age identifiers for the corresponding image sets (training, validation, train-
ing+validation and testing). Each line of the file contains a single image iden-
tifier, and a single object index. Together these specify a ‘person’ object for
which layout is provided or to be estimated, for example:

...
2009_000595 1
2009_000595 2
2009_000606 1
...

The following MATLAB code reads the image list into a cell array of strings
and the object indices into a corresponding vector:

imgset=’train’;
[imgids,objids]=textread(sprintf([Link], ...
[Link]),’%s %d’);

25
 The annotation for the object (bounding box only in the test data) can then
be obtained using the image identifier and object index:

rec=PASreadrecord(sprintf([Link],imgids{i}));
obj=[Link](objids{i});

10.2 Development Kit Functions

10.2.1 VOCinit
The VOCinit script initializes a single structure VOCopts which contains options
for the PASCAL functions including directories containing the VOC data and
options for the evaluation functions (not to be modified).
The field classes lists the object classes for the challenge in a cell array:

[Link]={’aeroplane’,’bicycle’,’bird’,’boat’,...
’bottle’,’bus’,’car’,’cat’,...
’chair’,’cow’,’diningtable’,’dog’,...
’horse’,’motorbike’,’person’,’pottedplant’,...
’sheep’,’sofa’,’train’,’tvmonitor’};
The field actions lists the action classes for the action classification task in
a cell array:
[Link]={’other’,’jumping’,’phoning’,’playinginstrument’,...
’reading’,’ridingbike’,’ridinghorse’,’running’,...
’takingphoto’,’usingcomputer’,’walking’};

The field trainset specifies the image set used by the example evaluation
functions for training:

[Link]=’train’; % use train for development

Note that participants are free to use both training and validation data in
any manner they choose for the final challenge.
The field testset specifies the image set used by the example evaluation
functions for testing:

[Link]=’val’; % use validation data for development

Other fields provide, for convenience, paths for the image and annotation
data and results files. The use of these paths is illustrated in the example
implementations.

10.2.2 PASreadrecord(filename)
The PASreadrecord function reads the annotation data for a particular image
from the annotation file specified by filename, for example:

>> rec=PASreadrecord(sprintf([Link],’2009_000067’))

rec =

folder: ’VOC2009’

26
 filename: ’2009_000067.jpg’
source: [1x1 struct]
size: [1x1 struct]
segmented: 0
imgname: ’VOC2009/JPEGImages/2009_000067.jpg’
imgsize: [500 334 3]
database: ’The VOC2009 Database’
objects: [1x6 struct]
The imgname field specifies the path (relative to the main VOC data path)
of the corresponding image. The imgsize field specifies the image dimensions
as (width,height,depth). The database field specifies the data source (e.g.
VOC2009 or VOC2012). The segmented field specifies if a segmentation is
available for this image. The folder and filename fields provide an alternative
specification of the image path, and size an alternative specification of the
image size:
>> [Link]

ans =

width: 500
height: 334
depth: 3
The source field contains additional information about the source of the image
e.g. web-site and owner. This information is obscured until completion of the
challenge.
Objects annotated in the image are stored in the struct array objects, for
example:
>> [Link](2)

ans =

class: ’person’
view: ’Right’
truncated: 0
occluded: 0
difficult: 0
label: ’PASpersonRight’
orglabel: ’PASpersonRight’
bbox: [225 140 270 308]
bndbox: [1x1 struct]
polygon: []
mask: []
hasparts: 1
part: [1x4 struct]
The class field contains the object class. The view field contains the view:
Frontal, Rear, Left (side view, facing left of image), Right (side view, facing
right of image), or an empty string indicating another, or un-annotated view.

27
 The truncated field being set to 1 indicates that the object is “truncated”
in the image. The definition of truncated is that the bounding box of the object
specified does not correspond to the full extent of the object e.g. an image of
a person from the waist up, or a view of a car extending outside the image.
Participants are free to use or ignore this field as they see fit.
The occluded field being set to 1 indicates that the object is significantly
occluded by another object. Participants are free to use or ignore this field as
they see fit.
The difficult field being set to 1 indicates that the object has been anno-
tated as “difficult”, for example an object which is clearly visible but difficult to
recognize without substantial use of context. Currently the evaluation ignores
such objects, contributing nothing to the precision/recall curve. The final evalu-
ation may include separate results including such “difficult” objects, depending
on the submitted results. Participants may include or exclude these objects
from training as they see fit.
The bbox field specifies the bounding box of the object in the image, as
[left,top,right,bottom]. The top-left pixel in the image has coordinates
(1, 1). The bndbox field specifies the bounding box in an alternate form:
>> [Link](2).bndbox

ans =

xmin: 225
ymin: 140
xmax: 270
ymax: 308

For backward compatibility, the label and orglabel fields specify the PAS-
CAL label for the object, comprised of class, view and truncated/difficult flags.
The polygon and mask fields specify polygon/per-object segmentations, and are
not provided for the VOC2012 data.
The hasparts field specifies if the object has sub-object “parts” annotated.
For the VOC2012 data, such annotation is available for a subset of the ‘person’
objects, used in the layout taster task. Object parts are stored in the struct
array part, for example:

>> [Link](2).part(1)

ans =

class: ’head’
view: ’’
truncated: 0
occluded: 0
difficult: 0
label: ’PAShead’
orglabel: ’PAShead’
bbox: [234 138 257 164]
bndbox: [1x1 struct]
polygon: []

28
 mask: []
hasparts: 0
part: []
The format of object parts is identical to that for top-level objects. For the
‘person’ parts in the VOC2012 data, parts are not annotated with view, or
truncated/difficult flags. The bounding box of a part is specified in image
coordinates in the same way as for top-level objects. Note that the object parts
may legitimately extend outside the bounding box of the parent object.
For ‘person’ objects in the action classification image sets, objects are addi-
tionally annotated with the set of actions being performed and a reference point
on the person’s body. The hasactions field specifies if the object has actions
annotated. Action flags are stored in the struct actions, for example:
>> [Link](1).actions

ans =

other: 0
phoning: 1
playinginstrument: 0
reading: 0
ridingbike: 0
ridinghorse: 0
running: 0
takingphoto: 0
usingcomputer: 0
walking: 0
There is one flag for each of the ten action classes plus ‘other’, with the flag
set to true (1) if the person is performing the corresponding action. Note that
actions except ‘other’ are not mutually-exclusive.
Each person in the action classification image sets is additionally annotated
with a reference point which is used to indicate the person’s approximate loca-
tion for the boxless action classification task. The haspoint field specifies if the
object has a reference point annotated, which is stored in the struct point, for
example:
>> [Link](1).point

ans =

x: 186
y: 210
The point is guaranteed to lie on the body and to be unoccluded by other
objects. Typically the point is located around the middle of their chest, although
this varies depending on pose and occlusions.

10.2.3 viewanno(imgset)
The viewanno function displays the annotation for images in the image set
specified by imgset. Some examples:

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>> viewanno(’Main/train’);
>> viewanno(’Main/car_val’);
>> viewanno(’Layout/train’);
>> viewanno(’Segmentation/val’);
>> viewanno(’Action/trainval’);

10.3 Classification Functions

10.3.1 VOCevalcls(VOCopts,id,cls,draw)
The VOCevalcls function performs evaluation of the classification task, com-
puting a precision/recall curve and the average precision (AP) measure. The
arguments id and cls specify the results file to be loaded, for example:
>> [rec,prec,ap]=VOCevalcls(VOCopts,’comp1’,’car’,true);

See example classifier for further examples. If the argument draw is true,
the precision/recall curve is drawn in a figure window. The function returns
vectors of recall and precision rates in rec and prec, and the average precision
measure in ap.

10.4 Detection Functions

10.4.1 VOCevaldet(VOCopts,id,cls,draw)
The VOCevaldet function performs evaluation of the detection task, computing
a precision/recall curve and the average precision (AP) measure. The arguments
id and cls specify the results file to be loaded, for example:

>> [rec,prec,ap]=VOCevaldet(VOCopts,’comp3’,’car’,true);
See example detector for further examples. If the argument draw is true, the
precision/recall curve is drawn in a figure window. The function returns vectors
of recall and precision rates in rec and prec, and the average precision measure
in ap.

10.4.2 viewdet(id,cls,onlytp)
The viewdet function displays the detections stored in a results file for the
detection task. The arguments id and cls specify the results file to be loaded,
for example:

>> viewdet(’comp3’,’car’,true)
If the onlytp argument is true, only the detections considered true positives by
the VOC evaluation measure are displayed.

10.5 Segmentation Functions

10.5.1 create segmentations from detections(id,confidence)
This function creates segmentation results from detection results.
create segmentations from detections(id) creates segmentations from
the detection results with specified identifier e.g. comp3. This is achieved by

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rendering the bounding box for each detection in class order, so that later classes
overwrite earlier classes (e.g. a person bounding box will overwrite an overlap-
ping an aeroplane bounding box). All detections will be used, no matter what
their confidence level.
create segmentations from detections(id,confidence) does the same,
but only detections above the specified confidence will be used.
See example segmenter for an example.

10.5.2 VOCevalseg(VOCopts,id)
The VOCevalseg function performs evaluation of the segmentation task, com-
puting a confusion matrix and segmentation accuracies for the segmentation
task. It returns per-class percentage accuracies, the average overall percentage
accuracy, and a confusion matrix, for example:

>> [accuracies,avacc,conf,rawcounts] = VOCevalseg(VOCopts,’comp3’)

Accuracies are defined by the intersection/union measure. The optional fourth
output ‘rawcounts’ returns an un-normalized confusion matrix containing raw
pixel counts. See example segmenter for another example. This function will
also display a table of overall and per-class accuracies.

10.5.3 VOClabelcolormap(N)
The VOClabelcolormap function creates the color map which has been used for
all provided indexed images. You should use this color map for writing your
own indexed images, for consistency. The size of the color map is given by N,
which should generally be set to 256 to include a color for the ‘void’ label.

10.6 Action Functions

10.6.1 VOCevalaction(VOCopts,id,cls,draw)
The VOCevalaction function performs evaluation of the action classification
task, computing a precision/recall curve and the average precision (AP) mea-
sure. The arguments id and cls specify the results file to be loaded, for example:
>> [rec,prec,ap]=VOCevalcls(VOCopts,’comp9’,’phoning’,true);

See example action for further examples. If the argument draw is true, the
precision/recall curve is drawn in a figure window. The function returns vectors
of recall and precision rates in rec and prec, and the average precision measure
in ap.
Note that the same evaluation function applies to both the action classifica-
tion task and boxless action classification task.

10.7 Layout Functions

10.7.1 VOCwritexml(rec,path)
The VOCwritexml function writes a MATLAB structure array to a correspond-
ing XML file. It is provided to support the creation of XML results files for the
person layout taster. An example of usage can be found in example layout.

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10.7.2 VOCevallayout pr(VOCopts,id,draw)
The VOCevallayout pr function performs evaluation of the person layout task,
computing a precision/recall curve and the average precision (AP) measure for
each part type (head/hands/feet). The arguments id and cls specify the results
file to be loaded, for example:
>> [rec,prec,ap]=VOCevallayout_pr(VOCopts,’comp7’,true);

See example layout for further examples. If the argument draw is true, the
precision/recall curves are drawn in a figure window. The function returns vec-
tors of recall and precision rates in reci and prec{i}, and the average precision
measure in ap{i}, where the index i indexes the part type in [Link].

Acknowledgements
We gratefully acknowledge the following, who spent many long hours providing
annotation for the VOC2012 database: Yusuf Aytar, Lucia Ballerini, Hakan
Bilen, Ken Chatfield, Mircea Cimpoi, Ali Eslami, Basura Fernando, Christoph
Godau, Bertan Gunyel, Phoenix/Xuan Huang, Jyri Kivinen, Markus Mathias,
Kristof Overdulve, Konstantinos Rematas, Johan Van Rompay, Gilad Sharir,
Mathias Vercruysse, Vibhav Vineet, Ziming Zhang, Shuai Kyle Zheng.
The preparation and running of this challenge is supported by the EU-funded
PASCAL2 Network of Excellence on Pattern Analysis, Statistical Modelling and
Computational Learning.

References
[1] The PASCAL Visual Object Classes Challenge (VOC2012). http://
[Link]/challenges/VOC/voc2012/[Link].

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