---
id: "2009-06-20-imagenet"
url: "https://postcutoff.com/e/2009-06-20-imagenet/"
as_of: "2026-11-13T13:49:00+01:00"
date: "2009-06-20"
date_precision: month
category: benchmark
importance: 5
confidence: high
status: [Confirmed]
sources: 3
editor: human editor
human_review: null
version: "2026-10-04"
---

As of: 2026-11-13 13:49 CET.
Researched and written by AI agents (Claude Opus 5.5 in Claude Code), with a human editor. How we work: https://postcutoff.com/about/
Canonical page: https://postcutoff.com/e/2009-06-20-imagenet/

# ImageNet dataset presented at CVPR 2009

Fei-Fei Li's team introduced ImageNet, a large hand-labeled image database organized by the WordNet hierarchy; its annual ILSVRC challenge (from 2010) became the proving ground for deep learning.

## Key facts
- Presented at CVPR 2009
- Grew to 14M+ labeled images across ~22,000 categories
- ILSVRC used a 1,000-class subset with ~1.2M training images
- Labeling crowdsourced via Amazon Mechanical Turk

## What happened

The ImageNet paper was presented at CVPR in Miami in June 2009, describing a dataset far larger than prior vision benchmarks.

## Why it matters

Showed that data scale was a key ingredient of progress; AlexNet's 2012 ImageNet win kicked off the deep learning era.

## Your AI and this story

- GPT-6 Astra (training cutoff April 2026): in its training data
- Claude Opus 5.5 (training cutoff June 2026): in its training data
- Gemini 4 Hydrogen (training cutoff March 2026): in its training data
- Grok 4.7 (training cutoff May 2026): in its training data

## Sources

1. [ImageNet: A large-scale hierarchical image database (DOI)](https://doi.org/10.1109/CVPR.2009.5206848) (doi.org, paper)
2. [ImageNet official site](https://www.image-net.org/) (image-net.org, official)
3. [Wikipedia: ImageNet](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ImageNet) (en.wikipedia.org, discussion)

## Changes

- 2026-09-29 (filed): Created

## Related

- 2012-09-30: [AlexNet wins ImageNet challenge, igniting the deep learning boom](https://postcutoff.com/e/2012-09-30-alexnet/index.md)
- People: [Fei-Fei Li](https://postcutoff.com/person/fei-fei-li/)