2021 International Conference on Computer Communication and Informatics (ICCCI -2021), Jan.
27-29, 2021, Coimbatore, INDIA
Kannada ImageNet: A Dataset for Image
Classification in Kannada
Ramesh G
Dept. of Computer Science and Engineering
2021 International Conference on Computer Communication and Informatics (ICCCI) | 978-1-7281-5875-4/21/$31.00 ©2021 IEEE | DOI: 10.1109/ICCCI50826.2021.9402356
University Visvesvaraya College of Engineering
Bengaluru, India
rameshmg6308@gmail.com
Atul M Bharadwaj
Dept. of Computer Science and Engineering
S J B Institute of Technology
Bengaluru, India
atulmb99@gmail.com
Abstract—Most of the ongoing research for image
classification happens in English and there is very little research
about classification of images in regional Indian languages like
Kannada. There are several uses and advantages of classifying
images natively in Kannada. A diverse dataset of 425,723 images
which is accurately labelled in Kannada is obtained through this
study, which adds to the contribution this paper makes to image
classification literature, that is verified and corrected by
human judge. It consists of 1,083 unique classes which was
constructed by a combination of randomly selecting classes from
ImageNet, a database commonly used for Image classification in
English as well as 193 manually thought out classes. The classes
were translated first using an online translation service and later
corrected by a human judge to achieve a translation accuracy of
97.15% on the entire dataset.
Keywords—Image classification, image processing,
information retrieval, Image dataset, Image classification in
Indian language, machine translation.
I. I NTRODUCTION
Kannada is one of the official languages of India and is
the administrative language of the state of Karnataka, India.
There are more than 60 million Kannada speakers all around
the world. The language is written utilizing the Kannada
script, which evolved from the Kadamba script (325-550 AD).
An area that has shown significant development in the field of
artificial intelligence is computer vision, specifically image
classification. The aim of image classification algorithms is to
identify features occurring in an image and provide an accurate
label based on the identified feature or group of features. As
there are many large datasets available for the task of image
classification, the accuracies of models and algorithms trained
and tested on these datasets are also very high. ImageNet [1] is
one such database that consists of more than 14 million
978-1-7281-5875-4/21/$31.00 ©2021 IEEE
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Srihari W
Dept. of Computer Science and Engineering
University Visvesvaraya College of Engineering
Bengaluru, India
srihariw1999@gmail.com
Champa H N
Dept. of Computer Science and Engineering
University Visvesvaraya College of Engineering
Bengaluru, India
champahn@yahoo.co.in
images. It contains images labelled using a WordNet [2] synset
that represents the labelled object in the image. All the images
in the database are labelled under 21,841 unique synsets.
Some of the synsets in ImageNet are more general, such as
device and food, while some other synsets are specific like
computer and fruit. The device synset consists of images like
a guitar, deer and squirrel, as shown in Figure 1. ImageNet
sources its images from a large number of different online
sources. Solving challenges in the domain of image processing
and classification using the dataset has been a hot topic for
researchers in the domain of computer vision and artificial
intelligence. The Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge is
a competition held annually in which people compete with
each other to solve a variety of challenges in image processing
using the ImageNet database [3]. This database has been a
tremendous resource for significant progress in image
processing for classification of moving objects in videos,
clustering search results and object segmentation in images.
Fig. 1. Some examples of images and their labels from ImageNet
All the significant developments for image classification are
concentrated in the English language. One of the reasons may
include the lack of big sized databases labelled in languages
other than English. Although there has been some research
 2021 International Conference on Computer Communication and Informatics (ICCCI -2021), Jan. 27-29, 2021, Coimbatore, INDIA
in the topic of image classification in languages other than
English, classification of images in Kannada remains largely
unexplored. The aim of this work is to provide a dataset for
the task of image classification in Kannada.
The three main contributions of this study are:
1) Previously, there has been very little focus on image
classification in Kannada. This study is one of the first
few to explore this area hence this can be a foundation
for further research in this topic.
2) This is also an attempt to further expand research for
image classification in languages other than English.
3) A dataset of 425,723 images with accurate Kannada
labels is provided through this dataset. This enables
further research to find new algorithms and solutions for
classification of images natively in Kannada, without the
need for any translation.
II. RELATED W ORK
A. IMAGE CLASSIFICATION
Image classification is a supervised learning problem in
which pixels in an image are assigned to a category or classes
of interest. Due to the availability of large scale image
databases, there have been significant advances in the field as
of late, and one such database is the ImageNet [1]. ImageNet
has been pivotal in advancing the progress of artificial
intelligence research on a wide scale, like image classification
and captioning as presented in [4], [5], [6], [7]. ImageNet has
sparked a large amount of research under image classification.
The use of convolutional neural networks [8] for image
classification have been vital for models that have beneficial
real world applications in a broad variety of fields. There is an
importance for zero-shot learning where the classes are
correctly identified even though they were not an exact match
with their labels from their training set [9]. By training on a
large dataset of the class, advances have been made in the
areas of object detection and object tracking. For applications
where text-based information retrieval is necessary, identifying
objects present in the image is hugely beneficial. Several such
applications rely on identifying objects from an image. Hence,
a large dataset is desirable for such purposes. Image
captioning is an area in which the contents of the image are
described after initial recognition [10], [11]. In certain
industries like healthcare, classifying images can be beneficial
in generating medical reports and other contextual information
from the contents of the image [12]. Image classification has
been researched and applied to a wide variety of industries but
most of the work has been in English, even though a large
amount of non-English speakers exists. Therefore, this issue
must be addressed so that the state-of-the-art methods of
image classification is not limited to just one language but also
benefits languages other than English. There have been
successful attempts in creating a dataset using translation
services to translate labels from English to Arabic by
Abdulkareem Alsudais [13] and hence borrows a similar
methodology for translating labels from English to Kannada.
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B. DATASETS IN KANNADA AND KANNADA NATURAL
LANGUAGE PROCESSING
There have been a few attempts at creating datasets in
kannada for the task of image classification in the past at a
smaller scale. The Char78K [14] is the largest dataset that
contains kannada labels and characters of numbers in the
kannada script. Kannada MNIST [15] provides a benchmark
style dataset for numbers in kannada. However, there is very
little work on any datasets outside numbers in the language.
There are numerous difficulties in further research for
developing NLP, neural networks solutions and algorithms
natively for Kannada and there is an immediate need for
datasets and other tools in order to further propagate research
areas in Kannada. There are little to no datasets that are
available for free use for the aforementioned purposes and
through this work we provide one such dataset.
III. M ETHODOLOGY
A sample of 1000 images from 1000 classes was selected
from the ImageNet database. After verifying the image URLs
from the database, it was found that some URLs were no
longer valid. As an implication, the sample reduced down to
293,213 images unevenly distributed among 890 classes. In
addition to these, there are 193 manually thought out classes
that were cross verified with the WordNet synset, and on
further evaluation of URLs, the sample added up to 132,510
images. Using the Google Translate service, the labels of both
of these sets of classes were then translated to Kannada. A
human judge evaluated the correctness of the translated labels
that were obtained from the translation service. The overview
of the methodology is represented in Figure 2.
Fig. 2. Overview of methodology for this study.
A. Collection of dataset
The dataset was collected using a script that downloaded the
images for a specified list of classes from existing ImageNet
URLs using the ImageNet API. The classes are a combination
of randomly chosen classes from a list from the ImageNet
synsets, manually thought out common image classes as well
as some from the classes of the COCO dataset [16]. All of
the synsets specified are unique. Since the images are obtained
from ImageNet URLs, the images are accurate for each class
and they contain only the specified object of interest.
 2021 International Conference on Computer Communication and Informatics (ICCCI -2021), Jan. 27-29, 2021, Coimbatore, INDIA
B. Translation process
Translation of all the English labels from ImageNet was
performed using the Google Cloud Translate API. The Google
Cloud Translate API can be used to translate a large amount
of given input text from one language to the selected language.
There is no information that is publicly available about the
accuracy of Google Translate for translations from English to
Kannada. However, translations from English to other
languages like Arabic [17] is known to be most ac- curate with
the Google Translation service as compared to Microsoft
Bing. Hence, because of its renowned popularity and
reliability, Google Translate was chosen for this study. Once
the translation service had translated all the labels, a human
judge carefully evaluated every label and corrected any
discrepancies in the translation. The differences in the
translation services or the vocabulary and knowledge of the
human judge may not produce the exact same results in this
study. This methodology was used to translate all the labels
for the 425,723 images to Kannada. The sample of accurately
labelled classes along with an image is shown in Figure 3.
However, there are certain limitations to this dataset. Firstly,
the generated dataset contains a smaller subset of fine grained
categories as compared to ImageNet database, as shown in
Table 2. Also, some of the classes might contain relatively
fewer images than some of the other classes because of the
ImageNet URLs being outdated/broken. Hence the distribution
of images over the 1,083 classes is uneven. Finally, some of the
synsets that are translated in Kannada are direct translations
i n which the synset in the language reads the same word in
English, represented as “English” in Table 1. A sample of
these classes are shown in Figure 4. This may be due to the
lack of a word in the dictionary in Kannada. Nevertheless,
while considering these limitations, this dataset is a valuable
resource that could be instrumental in further studies for image
classification in the regional language. This dataset of images
in correctly translated classes in Kannada can be provided at
request.
IV. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION
A human judge well versed in both English and Kannada
performed the complete evaluation of the translated labels
done by the translation service. The labels were classified as
“Accurate”, “Inaccurate”, “Neutral or English as shown in
Table 1, based on the judge’s knowledge of the language as
well as additional outside sources that give extra information
and context regarding the generated translations.
The accuracy of the translation service used for the translation
of labels in ImageNet from English to Kannada was measured
on the basis of accurate or inaccurate generated labels.
“Accurate and English are classified as accurate and
Inaccurate, “Neutral are classified as inaccurate labels. To
calculate the total accuracy in terms of percentage, the number
of images classified as accurate was divided by the total
number of images in the dataset. Hence the total translation
accuracy of the dataset is observed to be 97.15% for its
entirety. The distribution of accuracy of translations of classes
in terms of percentage is shown in figure 5.
TABLE I
SUMMARY OF RESULTS OF ONLINE TRANSLATION SERVICE
Result Number of Images Percentage
Accurate 307 28.35%
Inaccurate 16 1.47%
Neutral 15 1.38%
English 745 68.80%

Fig. 5. Distribution of accuracy of classes for percentages of “En-

glish”,“Accurate”,“Inaccurate”,“Neutral”.
Fig. 3. Sample of images with correctly translated labels.

TABLE II
PERCENTAGE OF SIZE OF PROPOSED DATASET

Accurate Kannada Percentage

Type Total in ImageNet
labels generated from ImageNet
Synsets 1,083 21,841 4.95%
Images 425,723 14,197,122 3%

Fig. 4. Sample of “English” translations of classes.

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 2021 International Conference on Computer Communication and Informatics (ICCCI -2021), Jan. 27-29, 2021, Coimbatore, INDIA
V. C ONCLUSION
A dataset of 425,723 images that are correctly labelled
under 1,083 unique Kannada labels are provided through this
study. Subsequent studies under the field of image
classification in Kannada can be carried out using this dataset.
Through this study we also found that additional pre-
processing to the labels passed to the translation service with
some modifications to provide the translation service with
more contextual information, if applied, can be used to achieve
better results. This study also reveals that the translations
obtained for some of the specific classes at the lower levels of
the WordNet have greater inaccuracies. This may be attributed
to the lack of such entities present in the region or uncertainty
about the existence of names for such classes in the language.
For example, a certain type of food that has originated
elsewhere in the world might not have any equivalent word
for it defined in the dictionary for Kannada, hence provides
inaccurate translations or direct (words that are written in
Kannada but are read in the same way as in their native
language) translations of the words to Kannada. Hence
accuracies of translations for such words can be improved
through some alternative methods of translating.
Future research can focus on providing Kannada labels for all
the classes for all images in ImageNet through the
methodology and evaluation techniques utilized in this study.
Another direction for research can include adding pre-
processing steps prior to the online translation process to
further improve the methodology. To increase the count of
true positives for the translations, a combination of various
other translation services can also be included.
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