Automated feature-specific tree species identification from natural images using deep semi-supervised learning

Abstract Prior work on plant species classification predominantly focuses on building models from isolated plant attributes. Hence, there is a need for tools that can assist in species identification in the natural world. We present a novel and robust two-fold approach capable of identifying trees in a real-world natural setting. Additionally, we leverage unlabelled data through deep semi-supervised learning and demonstrate superior performance to supervised learning. Our single-GPU implementation for feature recognition uses minimal annotated data and achieves accuracies of 93.96% and 93.11% for leaves and bark, respectively. Further, we extract feature-specific datasets of 50 species by employing this technique. Finally, our semi-supervised species classification method attains 94.04% top-5 accuracy for leaves and 83.04% top-5 accuracy for bark.