Efficient Approach for Rhopalocera Classification Using Growing Convolutional Neural Network

Abstract

In the present times, artificial-intelligence based techniques are considered as one of the prominent ways to classify images which can be conveniently leveraged in the real-world scenarios. This technology can be extremely beneficial to the lepidopterists, to assist them in classification of the diverse species of Rhopalocera, commonly called as butterflies. In this article, image classification is performed on a dataset of various butterfly species, facilitated via the feature extraction process of the Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) along with leveraging the additional features calculated independently to train the model. The classification models deployed for this purpose predominantly include K-Nearest Neighbors (KNN), Random Forest and Support Vector Machine (SVM). However, each of these methods tend to focus on one specific class of features. Therefore, an ensemble of multiple classes of features used for classification of images is implemented. This research paper discusses the results achieved from the classification performed on basis of two different classes of features i.e., structure and texture. The amalgamation of the two specified classes of features forms a combined data set, which has further been used to train the Growing Convolutional Neural Network (GCNN), resulting in higher accuracy of the classification model. The experiment performed resulted in promising outcomes with TP rate, FP rate, Precision, recall and F-measure values as 0.9690, 0.0034, 0.9889, 0.9692 and 0.9686 respectively. Furthermore, an accuracy of 96.98% was observed by the proposed methodology.