AppTree: An Intelligent Platform for Discovering the World of Plants

“AppTree” is an intelligent platform to bring researchers, visitors, and all interested people closer to the oldest and most attractive botanical garden at the University of Tehran. AppTree can scan the QR-Barcode of each plant in person by smartphone or search various plants on the website and get all the useful knowledge about them. Also, the ability of AppTree is the recognition of different plants which don’t have labels. The plant recognition part is a machine learning module that can identify more than 100 different species of plants and give the user details about them. This novel platform is based on Android and Web-app and the identification of new plants type is done by machine learning approach. We utilized VGG19, a deep CNN, to classify images and to identify unlabeled plants. The classification accuracy, F1-score, recall, and precision were 98.25, 93.16%, 88.21%, and 94.85%, respectively, on the plant dataset of the University of Tehran. The proposed method was compared with other deep learning architectures such as AlexNet, AlexNetOWTBn, and GoogLeNet on the same dataset and obtained higher performance. Our AppTree platform has achieved considerable success and easily can be extended to use in other botanical gardens.