DHMAPI: A Knowledge-Based System for Identification of Medicinal and Aromatic Plants

Abstract

About 43,000 plant species are said to exist in India of which 7,500 plant species are referred to in Indian folklore. The recent era has witnessed revitalisation in traditional health care system, and more people have started depending upon traditional herbal health care systems for various ailments. Majority of these medicinal plants are collected from the wild. Authentic identification/recognition of medicinal and aromatic plant species is a major challenge since there are a large number of vernacular names for the same species as well as different botanical species have the same common name. Hence, a knowledge-based system namely digital herbarium of medicinal and aromatic plants in India (DHMAPI) has been developed to help farmers and extension workers to identify medicinal and aromatic plants. The system is supported by a database containing information of about 350 medicinal and aromatic plant species and their colour images. High-resolution colour images of medicinal and aromatic plants were captured from different parts of India and integrated with technical information of respective species. Based on these herbaria information, a web-based system was developed and launched (http://www.dmapr.org.in:8080/dhmap/Home.jsp). The system, called DHMAPI, is a knowledge system that helps users to compare their unknown species with the existing dataset to identify their species.