IndoHerb: Indonesia Medicinal Plants Recognition using Transfer Learning and Deep Learning

TL;DR

This study employs transfer learning with CNNs to accurately classify Indonesian medicinal plants, achieving up to 92.5% accuracy, thereby aiding traditional herbal recognition and preservation.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive dataset and compares multiple transfer learning models, highlighting ConvNeXt as the most effective for Indonesian herbal plant classification.

Findings

ConvNeXt achieved 92.5% accuracy.

Transfer learning models outperform scratch models.

Effective hyperparameter setup enhances model performance.

Abstract

The rich diversity of herbal plants in Indonesia holds immense potential as alternative resources for traditional healing and ethnobotanical practices. However, the dwindling recognition of herbal plants due to modernization poses a significant challenge in preserving this valuable heritage. The accurate identification of these plants is crucial for the continuity of traditional practices and the utilization of their nutritional benefits. Nevertheless, the manual identification of herbal plants remains a time-consuming task, demanding expert knowledge and meticulous examination of plant characteristics. In response, the application of computer vision emerges as a promising solution to facilitate the efficient identification of herbal plants. This research addresses the task of classifying Indonesian herbal plants through the implementation of transfer learning of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN). To support our study, we curated an extensive dataset of herbal plant images from Indonesia with careful manual selection. Subsequently, we conducted rigorous data preprocessing, and classification utilizing transfer learning methodologies with five distinct models: ResNet, DenseNet, VGG, ConvNeXt, and Swin Transformer. Our comprehensive analysis revealed that ConvNeXt achieved the highest accuracy, standing at an impressive 92.5%. Additionally, we conducted testing using a scratch model, resulting in an accuracy of 53.9%. The experimental setup featured essential hyperparameters, including the ExponentialLR scheduler with a gamma value of 0.9, a learning rate of 0.001, the Cross-Entropy Loss function, the Adam optimizer, and a training epoch count of 50. This study's outcomes offer valuable insights and practical implications for the automated identification of Indonesian medicinal plants.