Leaf Identification Using a Deep Convolutional Neural Network

Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have become popular especially in computer vision in the last few years because they achieved outstanding performance on different tasks, such as image classifications. We propose a nine-layer CNN for leaf identification using the famous Flavia and Foliage datasets. Usually the supervised learning of deep CNNs requires huge datasets for training. However, the used datasets contain only a few examples per plant species. Therefore, we apply data augmentation and transfer learning to prevent our network from overfitting. The trained CNNs achieve recognition rates above 99% on the Flavia and Foliage datasets, and slightly outperform current methods for leaf classification.