Successful research, computer vision, and data science projects begin with quality datasets. Here is a collection of the top free and open research datasets, from computer vision datasets and machine learning to economics and space exploration.
With sources ranging from Microsoft and MIT to government databases, you'll find popular resources to support a wide range of data-driven tasks and research initiatives.
View and download all of the research datasets mentioned.
Explore Top Free and Open Research Datasets
These datasets are publicly available and can be leveraged to develop models, conduct experiments, or gain deeper insights into specific areas of study.
1. Microsoft COCO Dataset
This is a large-scale dataset of over 120,000 images designed for object detection, segmentation, and captioning tasks in computer vision. One of COCO's (Common Objects in Context) distinguishing features is its emphasis on objects in context: It includes images of everyday scenes with annotations for various objects in context from airplanes to cellphones, cats, donuts, and more. The dataset was created by Microsoft Research. Start using it on Roboflow here.
2. Microsoft Pose Detection Dataset
This is a specialized version of the COCO dataset, designed for human pose detection or pose estimation tasks, which can be great for sports, security, and healthcare, for example. It's helpful for understanding human movement, because its focused on identifying and localizing key points of the human body, such as the head, shoulders, elbows, wrists, hips, knees, and ankles. Use it here.
3. CIFAR-10 Dataset
The CIFAR-10 (Canadian Institute for Advanced Research) dataset consists of 60,000 color images in 10 classes (airplane, automobile, bird, cat, deer, dog, frog, horse, ship, truck) with 6,000 images per class, making it a popular dataset for training and evaluating image classification models. It's ideal for testing new architectures due to its small size. Unlike COCO, objects are centered without complex backgrounds, so there isn't much context. Use it here.
4. CIFAR-100 Dataset
CIFAR-100 is designed for fine-grained image classification and contains 100 different object categories - including animals, vehicles, household items, and natural objects - each with 600 images. The CIFAR-100 dataset is often used for transfer learning. See it here.
5. Oxford Flowers 102 Dataset
Created by the Visual Geometry Group (VGG) at the University of Oxford, this is a well-known image classification dataset designed for fine-grained visual categorization of flowers. As you can imagine, this dataset is challenging due to the high similarity between different flower species. It has 102 different species of flowers found in the UK, with categories including common flowers such as the daffodil, tulip, and more. The images have large scale, pose, and light variations, and the flowers are captured in different environments, from close-ups to distant shots. Explore it here.
6. TACO Object Detection Dataset
This dataset of over 1,500 images with more than 60 classes was created with the goal of helping train machine learning models to reduce trash - so we can harness AI to achieve tasks such as automated waste detection, recycling sorting, and environmental monitoring. The TACO (Trash Annotations in Context) Object Detection Dataset is an open-source dataset designed for litter detection and waste classification in real-world environments. It contains photos of litter taken under diverse environments, from tropical beaches to London streets. Use it here.
7. MIT Indoor Scene Recognition Dataset
With over 15,000 images, this dataset from MIT contains 67 different indoor scene categories, including kitchen, library, bedroom, hospital room, concert hall, subway station, gym, and more. The images are collected from various sources to ensure diversity in lighting conditions, viewpoints, and scene compositions, helping models to distinguish between indoor environments based on contextual clues. It's a useful data set for smart home and security applications, as well as robotics. Explore it here.
8. Oxford Pets Dataset
This dataset, created by the Visual Geometry Group at the University of Oxford, was designed for object recognition and classification tasks, specifically focused on identifying and classifying different breeds of cats and dogs in images. It's a 37 category pet dataset with roughly 200 images for each class. It can be helpful for applications where pet identification is crucial, such as in shelters, pet stores, or in AI systems designed for pet tracking. Use it.
9. Fashion-MNIST Dataset
This is a popular image classification dataset, created by Zalando, a German e-commerce company. Fashion-MNIST consists of 70,000 grayscale images of 10 different fashion items, including T-shirt/top, Trouser, Pullover, Dress, Coat, and more. It is often used to explore transfer learning. Find it here.
10. MNIST Dataset
This is one of the most well-known and widely used datasets in the field of machine learning and computer vision, dating back to 1994. The MNIST (Modified National Institute of Standards and Technology) consists of images representing handwritten digits from 0 to 9, making it a 10-class classification problem. Unlike more complex datasets, MNIST focuses on a single class of object (digits) and includes little variation in the context of the images. Use it here.
11. Data.gov
Created by the U.S. government, Data.gov provides free and open access to over 300,000 datasets across various sectors, including health, education, transportation, climate, and more. You can find datasets from numerous federal agencies, including NASA, Department of Transportation, Health and Human Services, and many others - in multiple formats such as CSV, JSON, XML, Excel, and geospatial formats.
12. Google Dataset Search
Developed by Google, this free tool helps users search for datasets across the web, pulling from government websites, academic publications, research institutions, and more. For each dataset, you can view a preview, including basic details such as the dataset’s name, description, file format, and the hosting site.
13. U.S. Census Bureau
Useful for policy, urban and rural planning, environmental studies and more, the U.S. Census Bureau provides a wealth of datasets related to demographic, social, economic, and geographic data for the United States. These free datasets are available in multiple formats including CSV, Excel, XML, API access, and geospatial formats (e.g., shapefiles, GeoJSON) for geographic data.
14. FiveThirtyEight
FiveThirtyEight regularly publishes the datasets used in its articles and analyses. The datasets span across politics, sports, economics, science and pop culture. And each includes detailed explanations of how the data was collected and how it is being analyzed, often with a focus on statistical methods.
15. NASA
Many of NASA's datasets are global in scope. The catalog features datasets related to space exploration, astronomy, Earth sciences, and other scientific research. As just one example, you can find data collected from space probes and rovers, such as the Mars Science Laboratory or the Voyager missions. NASA's datasets are available in multiple formats, including CSV, NetCDF, HDF5, GeoTIFF, and GRIB.
16. GitHub
Github features a range of free datasets. DataScience Datasets is a collection of open datasets related to economics, finance, and more, with clean and easy-to-use formats. Find U.S. government economic indicators, world Bank development indicators, and airline performance data. Awesome Public Datasets is a list of high-quality datasets available across economics, government data, biology, sports, and health. It's a useful starting point for finding datasets for almost any type of analysis or project - image, text (ex. IMDB reviews), time series (ex. financial stock data), and geospatial (ex. OpenStreetMap data).
Use Free Research Datasets For Your Next Project
The growing availability of open datasets provides a lot of promise for innovation. Hopefully these datasets accelerate your work and enhance its impact. For a large collection of free computer vision datasets and pre-trained models, visit Roboflow Universe.
Cite this Post
Use the following entry to cite this post in your research:
Trevor Lynn. (Feb 11, 2025). Top Free Research Datasets. Roboflow Blog: https://blog.roboflow.com/free-research-datasets/
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