Metric learning for image-based flower cultivars identification

Background The study of plant phenotype by deep learning has received increased interest in recent years, which impressive progress has been made in the fields of plant breeding. Deep learning extremely relies on a large amount of training data to extract and recognize target features in the field of plant phenotype classification and recognition tasks. However, for some flower cultivars identification tasks with a huge number of cultivars, it is difficult for traditional deep learning methods to achieve better recognition results with limited sample data. Thus, a method based on metric learning for flower cultivars identification is proposed to solve this problem. Results We added center loss to the classification network to make inter-class samples disperse and intra-class samples compact, the script of ResNet18, ResNet50, and DenseNet121 were used for feature extraction. To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed method, a public dataset Oxford 102 Flowers dataset and two novel datasets constructed by us are chosen. For the method of joint supervision of center loss and L2-softmax loss, the test accuracy rate is 91.88%, 97.34%, and 99.82% across three datasets, respectively. Feature distribution observed by T-distributed stochastic neighbor embedding (T-SNE) verifies the effectiveness of the method presented above. Conclusions An efficient metric learning method has been described for flower cultivars identification task, which not only provides high recognition rates but also makes the feature extracted from the recognition network interpretable. This study demonstrated that the proposed method provides new ideas for the application of a small amount of data in the field of identification, and has important reference significance for the flower cultivars identification research.