Identification of medicinal plant parts using depth-wise separable convolutional neural network

Identifying relevant plant parts is one of the most significant tasks in the pharmaceutical industry. Correct identification minimizes the risk of mis-identification, which might have unfavorable effects, and it ensures that plants are used medicinally. Traditional methods for plant part identification are often time-consuming and require specific expertise. This study proposed a Depth-wise Separable Convolutional Neural Network (DWS-CNN) to enhance the accuracy of medicinal plant part identification. Furthermore, we incorporated the tuned pre-trained models such as VGG16, Res Net-50, and Inception V3 which are designed by Standard convolutional neural network (S-CNN) for comparative purposes. We trained variants of the Standard convolutional neural network (S-CNN) model with high-resolution images of medicinal plant leaves which contains 15,100 leaf images. The study used supervised learning by which leaf images are used as an identity for the other parts of the plants. We used transfer learning to tune training and model parameters. Experimental results showed that our DWS-CNN model achieved better performance compared to S-CNN models, with an accuracy of 99.84% for training data, 99.44% for F1-score and 99.44% for testing data, which improves in both accuracy and training speed. The presence of depth-wise separable convolution and batch normalization at the fully connected layer of the model made the model achieved a good classification performance.