QT26-QC

QT26-QC is a fixed evaluation roster for fine-grained fish recognition. Its canonical test split contains 6,719 natural-photo queries across 3,121 FishBase 25.04 taxa, with encoded image bytes, labels, provenance, row-level licence and attribution, and image SHA-256 values.

from datasets import load_dataset

test = load_dataset("COVER-Fish/QT26-QC", split="test")

Why this benchmark is complementary

QT26-QC complements existing fish benchmarks along the temporal axis: FishNet provides a larger natural-photo roster, Fish-Vista provides museum specimens, and QT26-QC provides natural photographs whose recorded observation times all fall after a declared cutoff. The canonical window is 1 March 2026 02:31 UTC through 23 June 2026.

This boundary must be interpreted relative to each evaluated model's own training cutoff. It does not prove that source pixels never appeared earlier on the web or guarantee disjointness from any model's pretraining data.

Canonical scoring set

The sole scoring split is test (6,719 rows). A 6,734-row construction parent roster is retained under metadata/ for lineage only; the 15 Q-INT observation-overlap rows are listed under construction/ and are not present in the image split. The immutable E0 archive in the Full Payload Archive also contains the same canonical 6,719 rows.

The required submission format and fixed-denominator metrics are specified in evaluation/protocol.md. The included scorer reports query-micro and species-macro top-1/top-5/top-20 with a 20,000-replicate target-species-cluster bootstrap.

Two byte-identical access paths

• This repository stores the canonical images in Parquet for one-line loading and Dataset Viewer access.
• archive-access/download_original_e0.py retrieves the immutable E0 .tar.zst from the Full Payload Archive at DOI 10.57967/hf/9776, revision 4e437b6a2bf5f9a12a200bbe3a93411fe713db1f.

metadata/row-correspondence.tsv binds every Parquet row to its E0 archive member. schema/verify_bytes.py independently hashes the encoded bytes stored in Parquet; the build receipt records the full 6,719-row cross-check. archive-access/check_dependencies.py can be run manually to verify that the fixed E0 dependency still resolves to the recorded LFS content SHA-256. This is a user-invoked capability, not a continuing monitoring service. If an API omits the LFS oid, the tool can compare two fixed byte-range hashes while clearly distinguishing that check from a complete-file SHA-256.

Rights

This dataset uses license: other because the images retain their source licences. Every row records license_normalized, source URLs and attribution. The split contains CC BY-NC, CC BY, CC0, CC BY-NC-ND, CC BY-NC-SA and CC BY-SA material. The metadata and evaluation code do not relicense the underlying images; consult each row before reuse beyond evaluation.

Citation

• Cite the QT26-QC dataset DOI shown on this repository when using its queries or reporting benchmark results.
• Cite the COVER-Fish Reference-Update Benchmark when using gallery states, frozen embeddings or transition ledgers.
• Cite the COVER-Fish paper when using its method or scientific conclusions.
• Cite DOI 10.57967/hf/9776 when directly using the E0 archival object.

See CITATION.cff for creator metadata.