Rapid and Robust Automated Macroscopic Wood Identification System using Smartphone with Macro-lens
This addresses the need for frontline officials to combat illegal logging and timber trade, though it is incremental as it builds on existing computer-assisted methods.
The authors tackled the problem of rapid field identification of wood species for law enforcement by developing a system using a smartphone with a macro-lens and machine vision, achieving human-level accuracy with identification within seconds.
Wood Identification has never been more important to serve the purpose of global forest species protection and timber regulation. Macroscopic level wood identification practiced by wood anatomists can identify wood up to genus level. This is sufficient to serve as a frontline identification to fight against illegal wood logging and timber trade for law enforcement authority. However, frontline enforcement official may lack of the accuracy and confidence of a well trained wood anatomist. Hence, computer assisted method such as machine vision methods are developed to do rapid field identification for law enforcement official. In this paper, we proposed a rapid and robust macroscopic wood identification system using machine vision method with off-the-shelf smartphone and retrofitted macro-lens. Our system is cost effective, easily accessible, fast and scalable at the same time provides human-level accuracy on identification. Camera-enabled smartphone with Internet connectivity coupled with a macro-lens provides a simple and effective digital acquisition of macroscopic wood images which are essential for macroscopic wood identification. The images are immediately streamed to a cloud server via Internet connection for identification which are done within seconds.