Automated Identification of Herbarium Specimens at Different Taxonomic Levels

The estimated number of flowering plant species on Earth is around 400,000. In order to classify all known species via automated image-based approaches, current datasets of plant images will have to become considerably larger. To achieve this, some authors have explored the possibility of using herbarium sheet images. As the plant datasets grow and start reaching the tens of thousands of classes, unbalanced datasets become a hard problem. This causes models to be inaccurate for certain species due to intra- and inter-specific similarities. Additionally, automatic plant identification is intrinsically hierarchical. In order to tackle this problem of unbalanced datasets, we need ways to classify and calculate the loss of the model by taking into account the taxonomy, for example, by grouping species at higher taxon levels. In this research we compare several architectures for automatic plant identification, taking into account the plant taxonomy to classify not only at the species level, but also at higher levels, such as genus and family.