Flower classification using deep convolutional neural networks

Flower classification is a challenging task due to the wide range of flower species, which have a similar shape, appearance or surrounding objects such as leaves and grass. In this study, the authors propose a novel two-step deep learning classifier to distinguish flowers of a wide range of species. First, the flower region is automatically segmented to allow localisation of the minimum bounding box around it. The proposed flower segmentation approach is modelled as a binary classifier in a fully convolutional network framework. Second, they build a robust convolutional neural network classifier to distinguish the different flower types. They propose novel steps during the training stage to ensure robust, accurate and real-time classification. They evaluate their method on three well known flower datasets. Their classification results exceed 97% on all datasets, which are better than the state-of-the-art in this domain.