A High-Resolution Multifocal RGB Pollen Grain Image Dataset for Deep Learning Computer Vision Tasks from Biobío...

PollenBB16 is an RGB pollen image dataset of Chilean flora with pixel-accurate instance segmentation masks, whose annotation was fully verified by an expert palynologist to guarantee the taxonomic reliability of every published instance. The dataset is designed to close a concrete gap in existing palynological datasets, which typically combine low taxonomic diversity, few samples per class, and low-resolution crops restricted to bounding boxes. PollenBB16 contains 16,198 brightfield optical microscopy images at the native resolution of 3088  × 2064 pixels and 36,383 pixel-accurate polygons across 16 species from the Biobío Region, spanning endemic, native and exotic species of high ecological and melliferous value such as Eucryphia glutinosa and Quillaja saponaria (endemic), Gevuina avellana and Aristotelia chilensis (native), and Medicago sativa and Brassica rapa (introduced). Each spatial position is recorded at three focal planes. The displacement along the z axis reveals features of the exine together with information on the internal structure of the grain that remain inaccessible on a single plane. From this multifocal information, more robust convolutional networks can be trained with more accurate classification. The operational quality of the dataset is backed by a leakage-safe partition that keeps the three focal planes of the same position in the same subset to avoid metric inflation, complemented by a YOLO11n-seg baseline trained for 50 epochs that reaches 0.985 mask mAP@50 on the validation set, establishing a reproducible reference point. Beyond deep learning, PollenBB16 enables interdisciplinary applications in aerobiology, biodiversity monitoring under climate change, ecological restoration of the South American temperate forest, and botanical-origin authentication of Chilean monofloral honeys.