This dataset contains 101 full-field microscopic images of Ziehl–Neelsen stained sputum smear samples and their corresponding expert-annotated ground truth images for tuberculosis bacilli detection. Each raw image is paired with a corresponding ground truth image of the same filename. Ground truth annotations are provided as visual overlays, where circles indicate isolated bacilli and rectangles/squares indicate bacilli clusters.The following items must be cited if using this dataset: 1. @dataset{greeshma_tb_dataset_2026, author = {Greeshma K and Vishnukumar S}, title = {Tuberculosis Bacilli Detection Dataset: Ziehl–Neelsen Stained Sputum Smear Microscopic Images with Expert Annotations}, year = {2026}, publisher = {Zenodo}, doi = {10.5281/zenodo.19280029}, url = {https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19280029} } 2. The article is under consideration at "The Visual Computer", Springer journal titled as "Tuberculosis Bacilli Detection Enhanced: A Hybrid Attention Residual U-Net and Vision Transformer Approach".