Applications of Machine Learning to Botanical Classification

In the field of botany, it is often necessary for plants to be identified based on their phenotypical characteristics, whether in person or using previously collected image samples. This work can be tedious and challenging for a human botanist to complete, as datasets can be large and several species of plants strongly resemble each other. Various machine learning techniques, both supervised and unsupervised, can address this task with varying degrees of accuracy and efficiency thanks to their ability to identify subtle patterns in data. The objective of this research is to both conduct a review of previous studies that measure the effectiveness of various machine learning methods for plant identification and to build and test various models to draw up a comparison of the accuracies and efficiencies of the set of techniques. A review of the existing literature found that any of the studied machine learning techniques can yield a high level of accuracy when used in the correct situations and on a suitable dataset. The results gathered from the models built from this research show that all else being equal, complex convolutional neural networks perform the best on this task, yielding an accuracy of 85.4% on the larger dataset. The other models tested in descending order of accuracy on the same dataset are k-nearest neighbors, random forest, k-means clustering, and a decision tree classifier.