Automatic Plant Image Identification of Vietnamese species using Deep Learning Models

It is complicated to distinguish among thousands of plant species in the natural ecosystem, and many efforts have been investigated to address the issue. In Vietnam, the task of identifying one from 12,000 species requires specialized experts in flora management, with thorough training skills and in-depth knowledge. Therefore, with the advance of machine learning, automatic plant identification systems have been proposed to benefit various stakeholders, including botanists, pharmaceutical laboratories, taxonomists, forestry services, and organizations. The concept has fueled an interest in research and application from global researchers and engineers in both fields of machine learning and computer vision. In this paper, the Vietnamese plant image dataset was collected from an online encyclopedia of Vietnamese organisms, together with the Encyclopedia of Life, to generate a total of 28,046 environmental images of 109 plant species in Vietnam. A comparative evaluation of four deep convolutional feature extraction models, which are MobileNetV2, VGG16, ResnetV2, and Inception Resnet V2, is presented. Those models have been tested on the Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifier to experiment with the purpose of plant image identification. The proposed models achieve promising recognition rates, and MobilenetV2 attained the highest with 83.9%. This result demonstrates that machine learning models are potential for plant species identification in the natural environment, and future works need to examine proposing higher accuracy systems on a larger dataset to meet the current application demand.