Efficient Deep Learning Models for Categorizing Chenopodiaceae in the Wild

Abstract

The Chenopodiaceae species are ecologically and financially important, and play a significant role in biodiversity around the world. Biodiversity protection is critical for the survival and sustainability of each ecosystem and since plant species recognition in their natural habitats is the first process in plant diversity protection, an automatic species classification in the wild would greatly help the species analysis and consequently biodiversity protection on earth. Computer vision approaches can be used for automatic species analysis. Modern computer vision approaches are based on deep learning techniques. A standard dataset is essential in order to perform a deep learning algorithm. Hence, the main goal of this research is to provide a standard dataset of Chenopodiaceae images. This dataset is called ACHENY and contains 27030 images of 30 Chenopodiaceae species in their natural habitats. The other goal of this study is to investigate the applicability of ACHENY dataset by using deep learning models. Therefore, two novel deep learning models based on ACHENY dataset are introduced: First, a lightweight deep model which is trained from scratch and is designed innovatively to be agile and fast. Second, a model based on the EfficientNet-B1 architecture, which is pre-trained on ImageNet and is fine-tuned on ACHENY. The experimental results show that the two proposed models can do Chenopodiaceae fine-grained species recognition with promising accuracy. To evaluate our models, their performance was compared with the well-known VGG-16 model after fine-tuning it on ACHENY. Both VGG-16 and our first model achieved about 80% accuracy while the size of VGG-16 is about 16[Formula: see text] larger than the first model. Our second model has an accuracy of about 90% and outperforms the other models where its number of parameters is 5[Formula: see text] than the first model but it is still about one-third of the VGG-16 parameters.