Floralens: a Deep Learning Model for the Portuguese Native Flora
This provides a tool for citizen scientists and botanists in Portugal to identify native flora, but it is incremental as it uses existing methods on new data.
The paper tackled the problem of identifying Portuguese native flora species from images by constructing a dataset from public sources and training a deep learning model, achieving accuracy comparable to the state-of-the-art Pl@ntNet platform.
Machine-learning techniques, especially deep convolutional neural networks, are pivotal for image-based identification of biological species in many Citizen Science platforms. In this paper, we describe the construction of a dataset for the Portuguese native flora based on publicly available research-grade datasets, and the derivation of a high-accuracy model from it using off-the-shelf deep convolutional neural networks. We anchored the dataset in high-quality data provided by Sociedade Portuguesa de Botânica and added further sampled data from research-grade datasets available from GBIF. We find that with a careful dataset design, off-the-shelf machine-learning cloud services such as Google's AutoML Vision produce accurate models, with results comparable to those of Pl@ntNet, a state-of-the-art citizen science platform. The best model we derived, dubbed Floralens, has been integrated into the public website of Project Biolens, where we gather models for other taxa as well. The dataset used to train the model is also publicly available on Zenodo.