Mobile Leaf Classification Application Utilizing a Convolutional Neural Network

Plant classification is an important task in biological research. However, plant classification is a complex task that very few biologists are qualified experts to conduct. Therefore, an application to assist in this task would be extremely useful for biology students, researchers, and enthusiasts.A significant amount of research has been done for the task of classifying plants based upon images of their leaves; however, all of that research has utilized images of single leaves on a white background for classification to allow easy extraction of shape features. This is not realistic for field work since a natural picture of a leaf will have a complex background.This thesis applies a convolutional neural network to the problem in order to allow classification of images with natural backgrounds. A mobile application is built that can run this neural network on images taken by the device’s camera. This tool can be used to assist in complex plant classification tasks anywhere as long as they have a mobile device with them

Crop conditional Convolutional Neural Networks for massive multi-crop plant disease classification over cell phone acquired images taken on real field conditions

Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) have demonstrated their capabilities on the agronomical field, especially for plant visual symptoms assessment. As these models grow both in the number of training images and in the number of supported crops and diseases, there exist the dichotomy of (1) generating smaller models for specific crop or, (2) to generate a unique multi-crop model in a much more complex task (especially at early disease stages) but with the benefit of the entire multiple crop image dataset variability to enrich image feature description learning. In this work we first introduce a challenging dataset of more than one hundred-thousand images taken by cell phone in real field wild conditions. This dataset contains almost equally distributed disease stages of seventeen diseases and five crops (wheat, barley, corn, rice and rape-seed) where several diseases can be present on the same picture. When applying existing state of the art deep neural network methods to validate the two hypothesised approaches, we obtained a balanced accuracy (BAC=0.92) when generating the smaller crop specific models and a balanced accuracy (BAC=0.93) when generating a single multi-crop model. In this work, we propose three different CNN architectures that incorporate contextual non-image meta-data such as crop information onto an image based Convolutional Neural Network. This combines the advantages of simultaneously learning from the entire multi-crop dataset while reducing the complexity of the disease classification tasks. The crop-conditional plant disease classification network that incorporates the contextual information by concatenation at the embedding vector level obtains a balanced accuracy of 0.98 improving all previous methods and removing 71% of the miss-classifications of the former methods

Escape from Cells: Deep Kd-Networks for the Recognition of 3D Point Cloud Models

We present a new deep learning architecture (called Kd-network) that is designed for 3D model recognition tasks and works with unstructured point clouds. The new architecture performs multiplicative transformations and share parameters of these transformations according to the subdivisions of the point clouds imposed onto them by Kd-trees. Unlike the currently dominant convolutional architectures that usually require rasterization on uniform two-dimensional or three-dimensional grids, Kd-networks do not rely on such grids in any way and therefore avoid poor scaling behaviour. In a series of experiments with popular shape recognition benchmarks, Kd-networks demonstrate competitive performance in a number of shape recognition tasks such as shape classification, shape retrieval and shape part segmentation.Comment: Spotlight at ICCV'1

Object Recognition from very few Training Examples for Enhancing Bicycle Maps

In recent years, data-driven methods have shown great success for extracting information about the infrastructure in urban areas. These algorithms are usually trained on large datasets consisting of thousands or millions of labeled training examples. While large datasets have been published regarding cars, for cyclists very few labeled data is available although appearance, point of view, and positioning of even relevant objects differ. Unfortunately, labeling data is costly and requires a huge amount of work. In this paper, we thus address the problem of learning with very few labels. The aim is to recognize particular traffic signs in crowdsourced data to collect information which is of interest to cyclists. We propose a system for object recognition that is trained with only 15 examples per class on average. To achieve this, we combine the advantages of convolutional neural networks and random forests to learn a patch-wise classifier. In the next step, we map the random forest to a neural network and transform the classifier to a fully convolutional network. Thereby, the processing of full images is significantly accelerated and bounding boxes can be predicted. Finally, we integrate data of the Global Positioning System (GPS) to localize the predictions on the map. In comparison to Faster R-CNN and other networks for object recognition or algorithms for transfer learning, we considerably reduce the required amount of labeled data. We demonstrate good performance on the recognition of traffic signs for cyclists as well as their localization in maps.Comment: Submitted to IV 2018. This research was supported by German Research Foundation DFG within Priority Research Programme 1894 "Volunteered Geographic Information: Interpretation, Visualization and Social Computing

Hierarchical Deep Learning Architecture For 10K Objects Classification

Evolution of visual object recognition architectures based on Convolutional Neural Networks & Convolutional Deep Belief Networks paradigms has revolutionized artificial Vision Science. These architectures extract & learn the real world hierarchical visual features utilizing supervised & unsupervised learning approaches respectively. Both the approaches yet cannot scale up realistically to provide recognition for a very large number of objects as high as 10K. We propose a two level hierarchical deep learning architecture inspired by divide & conquer principle that decomposes the large scale recognition architecture into root & leaf level model architectures. Each of the root & leaf level models is trained exclusively to provide superior results than possible by any 1-level deep learning architecture prevalent today. The proposed architecture classifies objects in two steps. In the first step the root level model classifies the object in a high level category. In the second step, the leaf level recognition model for the recognized high level category is selected among all the leaf models. This leaf level model is presented with the same input object image which classifies it in a specific category. Also we propose a blend of leaf level models trained with either supervised or unsupervised learning approaches. Unsupervised learning is suitable whenever labelled data is scarce for the specific leaf level models. Currently the training of leaf level models is in progress; where we have trained 25 out of the total 47 leaf level models as of now. We have trained the leaf models with the best case top-5 error rate of 3.2% on the validation data set for the particular leaf models. Also we demonstrate that the validation error of the leaf level models saturates towards the above mentioned accuracy as the number of epochs are increased to more than sixty.Comment: As appeared in proceedings for CS & IT 2015 - Second International Conference on Computer Science & Engineering (CSEN 2015