The main goal of this challenge is to recognize objects from a number of visual object classes in realistic scenes (i.e. not pre-segmented objects). It is fundamentally a supervised learning problem in that a training set of labelled images is provided. The twenty object classes that have been selected are:

• Person: person
• Animal: bird, cat, cow, dog, horse, sheep
• Vehicle: aeroplane, bicycle, boat, bus, car, motorbike, train
• Indoor: bottle, chair, dining table, potted plant, sofa, tv/monitor

There are three main object recognition competitions: classification, detection, and segmentation, a competition on action classification, and a competition on large scale recognition run by ImageNet. In addition there is a "taster" competition on person layout.