Deep learning for plant identification using vein morphological patterns

[Display omitted] •Deep convolutional neural network (CNN) for plant identification focusing on leaf vein patterns.•No task-specific feature extractors needed.•Improved the state of the art accuracy on a legume species recognition task.•Visualization of relevant vein patterns. 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.