MmNet: Identifying Mikania micrantha Kunth in the wild via a deep Convolutional Neural Network

Abstract

Mikania micrantha Kunth is an invasive alien weed and known as a plant killer around the world. Accurately and rapidly identifying M. micrantha in the wild is important for monitoring its growth status, as this helps management officials to take the necessary steps to devise a comprehensive strategy to control the invasive weed in the identified area. However, this approach still mainly depends on satellite remote sensing and manual inspection. The cost is high and the accuracy rate and efficiency are low. We acquired color images of the monitoring area in the wild environment using an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) and proposed a novel network —MmNet— based on a deep Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) to identify M. micrantha in the images. The network consists of AlexNet Local Response Normalization (LRN), along with the GoogLeNet and continuous convolution of VGG inception models. After training and testing, the identification of 400 testing samples by MmNet is very good, with accuracy of 94.50% and time cost of 10.369 s. Moreover, in quantitative comparative analysis, the proposed MmNet not only has high accuracy and efficiency but also simple construction and outstanding repeatability. Compared with recently popular CNNs, MmNet is more suitable for the identification of M. micrantha in the wild. However, to meet the challenge of wild environments, more M. micrantha images need to be acquired for MmNet training. In addition, the classification labels need to be sorted in more detail. Altogether, this research provides some theoretical and scientific basis for the development of intelligent monitoring and early warning systems for M. micrantha and other invasive species.