IndoHerb: Indonesia medicinal plants recognition using transfer learning and deep learning

The rich diversity of herbal plants in Indonesia holds immense potential as alternative resources for traditional healing and ethnobotanical practices. However, the dwindling recog-nition 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, contributing not only to the preservation of ethnobotanical knowledge but also to the enhancement of agricultural practices through the cultivation of these valuable resources. The Indonesia Medicinal Plant Dataset utilized in this research is openly accessible at the following link: https://github.com/Salmanim20/indomedicinalplant.