Research on plant seeds recognition based on fine-grained image classification

Abstract

Seed phenomics is a comprehensive assessment of complex seed traits, and seed classification is an indispensable step. Plant seed recognition is of great significance in agricultural production, ecological environment, and biodiversity. However, some traditional artificial plant seed classification methods are expensive, time consuming, and laborious. Therefore, there is a need that cannot be ignored for a method to improve the situation. Artificial intelligence is making a huge impact on various fields through its perception, reasoning, and learning capabilities. A challenge in pratacultural research, the rapid auto-identification of plant seeds, might be better resolved by the integration of computer vision. For the lack of a public seed dataset for the training of models, we established a dataset called LZUPSD, which includes images of 88 different species of seeds. We explored methods to achieve fine-grained seed classification using convolutional neural networks and tried to apply a transformer to it. The method has the highest accuracy of more than 95%. The method is able to identify plant seeds automatically with high speed, low cost, and high accuracy. It results in a more efficient plant seed recognition method. At the same time, we have established a platform where users can upload pictures to obtain seed information. In addition, our dataset will be released to the public in the next phase in order to share with interested researchers.