🌳🌻 Plant Taxonomy Meets Plant Counting :🍀🍒
A Fine-Grained, Taxonomic Dataset for Counting Hundreds of Plant Species

[CVPR 2026 Oral] Official repository for the paper "Plant Taxonomy Meets Plant Counting: A Fine-Grained, Taxonomic Dataset for Counting Hundreds of Plant Species".

Authors: Jinyu Xu, Tianqi Hu, Xiaonan Hu, Letian Zhou, Songliang Cao, Meng Zhang, Hao Lu*

TPC-268 is a large-scale dataset for class-agnostic counting (CAC) that explicitly integrates plant taxonomy. It is designed to tackle the unique challenges of visual counting in the natural world, featuring highly diverse and nonrigid plant morphologies.

Dataset Overview

• Images: 10,000 images spanning extreme observation scales, ranging from canopy-level remote sensing to tissue-level microscopy.
• Annotations: 678,050 instance-level points and 30,000 exemplar bounding boxes.
• Taxonomy: A complete 7-level Linnaean hierarchy encompassing 2 Kingdoms (Plantae and Fungi), 2 Phyla, 4 Classes, 35 Orders, 83 Families, 192 Genera, and 242 Species.
• Categories: 268 fine-grained "Species-Organization" targets, providing precise semantics for counting (e.g., flower, fruit, leaf, stem, stoma, resin).

Sample images from the TPC-268 dataset.

Dataset Download

You can download TPC-268 from either of the following links: Hugging Face, Google Drive. Extract the downloaded file into a TPC-268/ directory. The images are strictly organized by their taxonomy and organization: TPC-268/[Genus_Species]/[Organization]/[Genus_Species]_[Organization]_[index].jpg

TPC-268/
├── Abelmoschus_esculentus/
│   └─ fruit/
│      ├─ Abelmoschus_esculentus_fruit_1.jpg
│      └─ ...
├── Zea_mays/
│   └─ fruit/
│      ├─ Zea_mays_fruit_1.jpg
│      └─ ...
└── ...

Annotations and Splits

Core data files are located in the annotations/ and splits/ directories:

• annotations/tpc268_annotations.json: Instance-level point annotations and 4-point coordinates for exemplars.
• annotations/tpc268_taxonomy_ids.json: Mapping of hierarchical taxonomic levels (Kingdom to Species) to unique numerical IDs.
• annotations/tpc268_taxonomy_vectors.json: 7-dimensional taxonomic feature vectors for each plant species.
• splits/tpc268_[train|val|test].txt: Lists of relative image paths used for data loading.
• splits/tpc268_split.json: Lists of specific species-organization categories partitioned into the train, val, and test sets.

Scripts

The tools/ directory provides essential utilities:

tpc268_dataset.py: A standardized PyTorch Dataset class to load images and annotations.

from tools.tpc268_dataset import TPC268Dataset
dataset = TPC268Dataset(data_dir='TPC-268/', split_txt='splits/tpc268_train.txt', anno_json='annotations/tpc268_annotations.json')

tpc268_visualize_dataset.py: Script to overlay annotations on images.

python tools/tpc268_visualize_dataset.py --img_path TPC-268/Zea_mays/fruit/Zea_mays_fruit_1.jpg --anno_json annotations/tpc268_annotations.json

TPC268_Annotator.html: An HTML tool for browsing and editing annotations directly in the browser. tpc268_generate_benchmark_split.py: Script to generate the dataset partitioning lists.

Benchmark Results

The following table reports the 3-shot counting performance on TPC-268, best performance is highlighted in bold. For other experimental results, please refer to the main paper.

Method	Backbone	Val MAE	Val RMSE	Val $R^2$	Test MAE	Test RMSE	Test $R^2$
FamNet	R50	28.87	52.51	0.58	30.43	65.62	0.62
BMNet+	R50	29.33	77.78	0.47	27.78	57.25	0.74
C-DETR	R50	22.66	77.51	0.75	22.68	57.97	0.74
SPDCNet	R18	25.66	72.49	0.52	23.70	47.53	0.64
CountTR	Hybrid	20.21	55.82	0.73	25.19	49.94	0.62
SAFECount	R18	22.57	63.65	0.64	25.70	52.30	0.58
LOCA	R50	17.26	53.19	0.75	17.51	38.37	0.78
DAVE	R50	16.47	52.87	0.76	17.61	40.06	0.75
CACVIT	ViT-B	16.63	42.49	0.82	22.04	41.79	0.73
CountGD	Swin-B	18.32	54.55	0.74	19.52	50.51	0.61
TasselNetV4	ViT-B	13.20	43.93	0.83	22.95	51.36	0.60

Citation

If you find TPC-268 useful for your research, please cite:

@inproceedings{xu2026plant,
  title={Plant Taxonomy Meets Plant Counting: A Fine-Grained, Taxonomic Dataset for Counting Hundreds of Plant Species},
  author={Xu, Jinyu and Hu, Tianqi and Hu, Xiaonan and Zhou, Letian and Cao, Songliang and Zhang, Meng and Lu, Hao},
  booktitle={Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)},
  year={2026}
}

License

The TPC-268 dataset is released exclusively for academic research purposes. It is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC 4.0). Any commercial use, reproduction, or distribution of this dataset without explicit prior consent is strictly prohibited.