Plant Species Identification based on Plant Leaf Using Computer Vision and Machine Learning Techniques

Plants are very crucial for life on Earth. There is a wide variety of plant species available, and the number is increasing every year. Species knowledge is a necessity of various groups of society like foresters, farmers, environmentalists, educators for different work areas. This makes species identification an interdisciplinary interest. This, however, requires expert knowledge and becomes a tedious and challenging task for the non-experts who have very little or no knowledge of the typical botanical terms. However, the advancements in the fields of machine learning and computer vision can help make this task comparatively easier. There is still not a system so developed that can identify all the plant species, but some efforts have been made. In this study, we also have made such an attempt. Plant identification usually involves four steps, i.e. image acquisition, pre-processing, feature extraction, and classification. In this study, images from Swedish leaf dataset have been used, which contains 1,125 images of 15 different species. This is followed by pre-processing using Gaussian filtering mechanism and then texture and color features have been extracted. Finally, classification has been done using Multiclass-support vector machine, which achieved accuracy of nearly 93.26%, which we aim to enhance further.