Multiscale Convolutional Neural Networks with Attention for Plant Species Recognition

Plant species recognition is a critical step in protecting plant diversity. Leaf-based plant species recognition research is important and challenging due to the large within-class difference and between-class similarity of leaves and the rich inconsistent leaves with different sizes, colors, shapes, textures, and venations. Most existing plant leaf recognition methods typically normalize all leaf images to the same size and then recognize them at one scale, which results in unsatisfactory performances. A novel multiscale convolutional neural network with attention (AMSCNN) model is constructed for plant species recognition. In AMSCNN, multiscale convolution is used to learn the low-frequency and high-frequency features of the input images, and an attention mechanism is utilized to capture rich contextual relationships for better feature extraction and improving network training. Extensive experiments on the plant leaf dataset demonstrate the remarkable performance of AMSCNN compared with the hand-crafted feature-based methods and deep-neural network-based methods. The maximum accuracy attained along with AMSCNN is 95.28%.