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.