Deep learning for plant identification using vein morphological patterns

Abstract

We propose using a deep convolutional neural network (CNN) for the problem of plant identification from leaf vein patterns. In particular, we consider classifying three different legume species: white bean, red bean and soybean. The introduction of a CNN avoids the use of handcrafted feature extractors as it is standard in state of the art pipeline. Furthermore, this deep learning approach significantly improves the accuracy of the referred pipeline. We also show that the reported accuracy is reached by increasing the model depth. Finally, by analyzing the resulting models with a simple visualization technique, we are able to unveil relevant vein patterns.