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

TL;DR

This paper introduces TPC-268, a comprehensive plant counting dataset with taxonomy labels, enabling hierarchical and species-aware counting across diverse scales, to advance fine-grained plant analysis in computer vision.

Contribution

The paper presents the first taxonomy-aware plant counting benchmark with detailed annotations, supporting hierarchical reasoning and multi-scale analysis for the first time.

Findings

Benchmarking of state-of-the-art counting methods on TPC-268.

Demonstration of taxonomy and scale as important factors in plant counting.

Establishment of a new biologically grounded dataset for plant counting research.

Abstract

Visually cataloging and quantifying the natural world requires pushing the boundaries of both detailed visual classification and counting at scale. Despite significant progress, particularly in crowd and traffic analysis, the fine-grained, taxonomy-aware plant counting remains underexplored in vision. In contrast to crowds, plants exhibit nonrigid morphologies and physical appearance variations across growth stages and environments. To fill this gap, we present TPC-268, the first plant counting benchmark incorporating plant taxonomy. Our dataset couples instance-level point annotations with Linnaean labels (kingdom -> species) and organ categories, enabling hierarchical reasoning and species-aware evaluation. The dataset features 10,000 images with 678,050 point annotations, includes 268 countable plant categories over 242 plant species in Plantae and Fungi, and spans observation scales from canopy-level remote sensing imagery to tissue-level microscopy. We follow the problem setting of class-agnostic counting (CAC), provide taxonomy-consistent, scale-aware data splits, and benchmark state-of-the-art regression- and detection-based CAC approaches. By capturing the biodiversity, hierarchical structure, and multi-scale nature of botanical and mycological taxa, TPC-268 provides a biologically grounded testbed to advance fine-grained class-agnostic counting. Dataset and code are available at https://github.com/tiny-smart/TPC-268.