IndoLepAtlas

A large-scale computer vision dataset of Indian butterflies, moths, and their larval host plants. Sourced from ifoundbutterflies.org with public CC-licensed photographs.

Inspired by: iNaturalist | Domain: Indian Wildlife & Biodiversity

Dataset Overview

	Butterflies	Host Plants	Total
Species	~967	~127	~1,094
Images	~2,000+	~700+	~2,700+
Source	ifoundbutterflies.org	ifoundbutterflies.org	—

Motivation

Existing CV datasets (ImageNet, iNaturalist) under-represent Indian biodiversity. India hosts ~1,500 butterfly species — many endemic and poorly documented in digital datasets. This dataset enables:

Species classification of Indian butterflies and host plants
Object detection with auto-generated bounding boxes
Ecological analysis of butterfly-plant host relationships
Diagnostic analysis using pretrained models

Directory Structure

IndoLepAtlas/
├── data/
│   ├── butterflies/
│   │   ├── raw/              # Original images (with overlays)
│   │   ├── images/           # Clean trimmed images
│   │   └── metadata.csv      # Enriched per-image metadata
│   └── plants/
│       ├── raw/
│       ├── images/
│       └── metadata.csv
├── annotations/
│   ├── butterflies/*.txt     # YOLO format
│   ├── plants/*.txt          # YOLO format
│   ├── annotations.json      # COCO format (combined)
│   └── classes.txt           # Species→ID mapping
├── splits/
│   ├── train.txt (70%)
│   ├── val.txt   (15%)
│   └── test.txt  (15%)
├── docs/
│   ├── class_definitions.json
│   ├── annotation_guide.md
│   ├── data_card.md
│   └── distribution_stats.md
├── README.md
└── LICENSE

Metadata Fields

Butterflies (`metadata.csv`)

image_id, filename, species, common_name, family, subfamily, genus, order, life_stage, sex, media_code, location, state, date, credit, source_url, source, split

Plants (`metadata.csv`)

image_id, filename, species, family, genus, image_type, media_code, location, state, date, credit, butterfly_hosts, source_url, source, split

Annotation Format

YOLO (per image): <class_id> <x_center> <y_center> <width> <height> (normalized)
COCO (annotations.json): standard format with images, categories, annotations
Classes: Species-level (~1,094 classes). See annotations/classes.txt

Pipeline Scripts

Script	Purpose
`pull_hf_data.py`	Download datasets from HuggingFace
`process_images.py`	Trim overlay text bands
`enrich_metadata.py`	OCR overlay extraction → metadata CSVs
`generate_annotations.py`	Auto bounding boxes (Grounding DINO)
`generate_splits.py`	Stratified train/val/test splits
`generate_stats.py`	Distribution statistics
`crawler_logged.py`	Butterfly species scraper
`plant_crawler.py`	Host plant species scraper

All pipeline scripts are incremental — they skip already-processed data and support adding new species non-destructively.

Ethical Guidelines

All images are from publicly available sources (ifoundbutterflies.org)
Photographer credits are preserved in metadata via OCR extraction
No human faces or personal information in the dataset
Source URLs and attribution maintained for every image

Citation

@dataset{indolepatlas2026,
  title={IndoLepAtlas: Indian Lepidoptera and Host Plants Dataset},
  year={2026},
  source={ifoundbutterflies.org},
  license={CC BY-NC-SA 4.0}
}

License

This dataset is released under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.

IndoLepAtlas — Indian Lepidoptera & Host Plants Dataset