Places in the Wild: A Large, High-Resolution RAW Photograph Dataset for Ecologically Valid Vision Research

Abstract

Large image datasets have accelerated progress in cognitive neuroscience and computer vision. However, most datasets are low-resolution, internet-sourced JPEGs with unknown capture conditions and limited spatial context. Places in the Wild is a dataset of 67,574 high-resolution photographs collected in situ across 810 physical locations spanning 260 basic-level scene categories, including indoor, urban, and natural environments. At each location, a 45-megapixel Canon EOS R5 mounted on a panoramic tripod captured 72 images at 5-degree horizontal intervals plus 12 images at varying elevations, yielding dense 360-degree viewpoint sampling. All images were recorded simultaneously as 14-bit RAW (CR3) files and compressed JPEGs, preserving sensor-level detail for analyses of luminance, contrast, color, and other image statistics. The dataset is accompanied by complete EXIF metadata and a suite of image-quality metrics. Places in the Wild supports research on viewpoint-dependent recognition in humans and models, training and evaluation of scene-understanding systems under realistic conditions, characterization of natural scene statistics, and experiments requiring near-full-field visual displays.