An uncompressed benchmark image dataset for colour imaging

Virtually all vision and imaging applications and algorithms require validation and evaluation, yet benchmarking and evaluation have proven to be difficult and challenging. This is partly due to the amount of work involved in performing an appropriate and convincing test, but is also often hindered by the fact that there are rather few test datasets that are publicly available. In this paper we present UCID10K, an image database comprising 10,000 colour images. Importantly, all images in the dataset are captured and preserved in uncompressed form allowing its use for benchmarking a variety of imaging applications including image compression, colour quantisation, steganography and image forensics. In addition, a ground truth for the evaluation of content-based image retrieval algorithms is provided enabling the UCID dataset to be used for assessing the performance of image querying techniques but also the testing of compressed-domain retrieval techniques. The UCID10K database is publicly available to fellow researchers.