Optimized convolutional neural network model for plant species identification from leaf images using computer vision

In recent works of computer science, especially in the fields of image processing and pattern recognition techniques with machine learning, considerable focus is given to plant taxonomy which enhances the abilities of people to recognize plant species. This paper presents a method that analyzes color images of leaves using a type of Convolutional Neural Network to recognize plant species. The proposed Neural Network consists of four convolutional layers followed by two Fully-Connected layers and a final soft-max layer to offer a feature representation for different plant species. Four max-pooling layers are performed over a 2 × 2 pixel window with stride 2. Results on five plant datasets viz. Leaf snap (52 plant species), UCI leaf (40 plant species), PlantVillage (38 plant species), Flavia (32 plant species) and Swedish (15 plant species) are tabulated that demonstrate the remarkable performance of the proposed deep neural network when compared to the state of art methods.