Deep Learning with Taxonomic Loss for Plant Identification

Plant identification is a fine-grained classification task which aims to identify the family, genus, and species according to plant appearance features. Inspired by the hierarchical structure of taxonomic tree, the taxonomic loss was proposed, which could encode the hierarchical relationships among multilevel labels into the deep learning objective function by simple group and sum operation. By training various neural networks on PlantCLEF 2015 and PlantCLEF 2017 datasets, the experimental results demonstrated that the proposed loss function was easy to implement and outperformed the most commonly adopted cross-entropy loss. Eight neural networks were trained, respectively, by two different loss functions on PlantCLEF 2015 dataset, and the models trained by taxonomic loss led to significant performance improvements. On PlantCLEF 2017 dataset with 10,000 species, the SENet-154 model trained by taxonomic loss achieved the accuracies of 84.07%, 79.97%, and 73.61% at family, genus and species levels, which improved those of model trained by cross-entropy loss by 2.23%, 1.34%, and 1.08%, respectively. The taxonomic loss could further facilitate the fine-grained classification task with hierarchical labels.