Generating artificial images of plant seedlings using generative adversarial networks

Plants seedlings are a part of a domain with low inter-class and relatively high intra-class variance with respect to visual appearance. This paper presents an approach for generating artificial image samples of plant seedlings using generative adversarial networks (GAN) to alleviate for the lack of training data for deep learning systems in this domain. We show that it is possible to use GAN to produce samples that are visually distinct across nine different plants species and maintain a high amount variance within each species. The generated samples resemble the intended species with an average recognition accuracy of 58.9 +/- 9.2%, evaluated using a state-of-the-art classification model. The observed errors are related to samples representing species which are relatively anonymous at the dicotyledonous growth stage and to the model's incapability to reproduce small shape details. The artificial plant samples are also used for pretraining a classification model, which is fine-tuned using real data. The pretrained model achieves 62.0 +/- 5.3% accuracy on classifying real plant seedlings prior to any finetuning, thus providing a strong basis for further training. However, finetuning the pretrained models show no performance increase compared to models trained without finetuning, as both approaches are capable of achieving near perfect classification on the dataset applied in this work. (C) 2019 IAgrE. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.