Recognition of Ziziphus lotus through Aerial Imaging and Deep Transfer Learning Approach

There is a growing demand for the detection of endangered plant species through machine learning approaches. Ziziphus lotus is an endangered deciduous plant species in the buckthorn family (Rhamnaceae) native to Southern Europe. Traditional methods such as object-based image analysis have achieved good recognition rates. However, they are slow and require high human intervention. Transfer learning-based methods have several applications for data analysis in a variety of Internet of Things systems. In this work, we have analyzed the potential of convolutional neural networks to recognize and detect the Ziziphus lotus plant in remote sensing images. We fine-tuned Inception version 3, Xception, and Inception ResNet version 2 architectures for binary classification into plant species class and bare soil and vegetation class. The achieved results are promising and effectively demonstrate the better performance of deep learning algorithms over their counterparts.