HerbSimNet: Deep Learning -Based Classification of Indian Medicinal Plants with High Inter-Class Similarities

Medicinal plant species recognition is important across diverse sectors such as Ayurveda, agriculture, environment conservation and botanical research. Specific groups of plants in Indian medicinal plant ecosystem exhibit significant inter-class similarities due to varying abundance and ecological factors. To address the challenges involved in the process of classifying these species in this work a deep learning model Herb-SimNet is proposed. The Herb-SimNet analyzes similarity of plant species over other plant species using vision based deep learning and machine learning techniques. The proposed model works based on the combination of wavelet features and convolutional features extracted using three sequential convolution layers to extract the prominent features that distinguish variations among the inter class similarity plant species. To perform experiments, a dataset is created by capturing medicinal plant leaf images using box model in plain background and uniform lighting. A smart phone captured twelve Indian medicinal plant species comprising of about 1400+ samples that belongs different plant species but similar morphological structure is collected. Baseline experiments are carried out between Herb-SimNet and other state-of-the-art deep learning models for classification based on the proposed dataset. The outcomes demonstrate that Herb_SimNet provides clear interpretation one plant variety with others and achieves superior accuracy in prediction than that of state-of-the-art approaches. Furthermore, the model demonstrates better generalization towards the other inter-class similarity groups considered for testing. In conclusion, the proposed dataset and Herb-SimNet plays a a crucial role in advancement of research concerning Indian medicinal plant species classification resulting into enhancement of AI-based technology for biodiversity conservation and ethnobotanical studies.