Please forward to whom shall be interested, thanks *LifeCLEF 2014: Call for participation*
*A new lab of CLEF dedicated to life media.* http://www.lifeclef.org/ Building accurate knowledge of the identity, the geographic distribution and the evolution of living species is essential for a sustainable development of humanity as well as for biodiversity conservation. In this context, using multimedia identification tools is considered as one of the most promising solution to help bridging the taxonomic gap. With the recent advances in digital devices/equipment, network bandwidth and information storage capacities, the production of multimedia big data has indeed become an easy task. In parallel, the emergence of citizen sciences and social networking tools has fostered the creation of large and structured communities of nature observers (e.g. e-bird, Xeno-canto, Tela Botanica, etc.) who started to produce outstanding collections of multimedia records. Unfortunately, the performance of the state-of-the-art multimedia analysis techniques on such data is still not well understood and is far from reaching the real world’s requirements in terms of identification tools. The LifeCLEF lab proposes to evaluate these challenges around 3 tasks related to fine-grained classification problems in 3 living worlds. Each task is based on large and real-world data and the measured challenges are defined in collaboration with biologists and environmental stakeholders in order to reflect realistic usage scenarios. - BirdCLEF: an audio record-based bird identification task * based on the Xeno-canto social network* * 500 bird species from Brazil from hundreds recordists* * around 15k audio records* - PlantCLEF: an image-based plant identification task * based on the Tela Botanica social network* * 500 plant species centered on France from hundreds recordists* * around 50k images * - FishCLEF: a fish video surveillance task * based on the Fish4Knowledge network* * 30 fish species from the Taiwan's coral reef from underwater cameras* * 2000 videos, and 2 millions of pictures * *Tentative schedule:* 15.11.2013: registration opens for all CLEF tasks 15.01.2014: training data release (depends on the task) 15.03.2014: test data release (depends on the task) 15.05.2014 deadline for submission of runs 30.05.2014: release of results 15.06.2014: deadline for submission of working notes 16-18.09.2014: CLEF 2014 Conference (Sheffield, UK) *More informations:* http://www.lifeclef.org/ http://www.lifeclef.org/bird/ http://www.lifeclef.org/plant/ http://www.lifeclef.org/fish/
