WTPlant (What's That Plant?): A Deep Learning System for Identifying Plants in Natural Images

Despite the availability of dozens of plant identification mobile applications, identifying plants from a natural image remains a challenging problem - most of the existing applications do not address the complexity of natural images, the large number of plant species, and the multi-scale nature of natural images. In this technical demonstration, we present the WTPlant system for identifying plants in natural images. WTPlant is based on deep learning approaches. Specifically, it uses stacked Convolutional Neural Networks for image segmentation, a novel preprocessing stage for multi-scale analyses, and deep convolutional networks to extract the most discriminative features. WTPlant employs different classification architectures for plants and flowers, thus enabling plant identification throughout all the seasons. The user interface also shows, in an interactive way, the most representative areas in the image that are used to predict each plant species. The first version of WTPlant is trained to classify 100 different plant species present in the campus of the University of Hawai'i at Manoa. First experiments support the hypothesis that an initial segmentation process helps guide the extraction of representative samples and, consequently, enables Convolutional Neural Networks to better recognize objects of different scales in natural images. Future versions aim to extend the recognizable species to cover the land-based flora of the Hawaiian Islands.