Plants are a fundamental part of life on our planet. They give us oxygen to breathe, food, medicine and a plenty of other things which make our lives worth living. They are the backbone of all life 68. But, identifying the plants correctly is out of reach of an ordinary person as it requires specialized knowledge. Only experts of botanical background are able to pull off this task. Moreover, even botanists do not have knowledge of all the existing plants on this world as there is an unlimited number of plant species. Hence, the task of plant identification is limited to a very small number of people. However, a good understanding of plants is essential to help identify new or rare plant species in order to improve the pharmaceutical industry, balance the ecosystem as well as the agricultural productivity and sustainability 68. “Therefore, rapid and accurate plant identification is essential for effective study and management of biodiversity” says Wäldchen et al. 38. There are enormous plant species in the world 39. There are nearly 390,000 species of plants and each year new species are reported in different parts of the world 70. Two plants are not alike, requiring in-depth taxonomic knowledge to identify a plant and assign it to a particular species. A lot of activities, such as studying the flora of a particular area, investigation of the endangered species, discovering and reporting new plant species upon precise and accurate identification skills. With this the need for automated identification of plant species is increasing, but unfortunately, the number of experts in plant systematics is limited.
In manual identification, botanists use certain defined plant characteristics as a key for identification, which are helpful in identifying plant species 38. The identification keys involve features such as shape, colour, texture, venation of an unknown plant. When thoroughly examined, these characteristics eventually lead to the desired species. However, the identifying a plant species from a natural site demands an extraordinary taxonomical expertise, which is beyond the capacity of any ordinary person. As a result, conventional plant species identification methods are impractical for the ordinary people and is a challenge for the professional taxonomists as well 39. Even for the expert botanists, species identification is often a laborious task. Thus, manual identification is often time consuming and inefficient 27, even the expert taxonomists take considerable amount of time to identify a plant species. As a result, researchers felt the need to develop automates plant species identification and classification systems which can serve the purpose of species recognition for both the general public and the experts. Also, there have been successful attempts to this automated process of species identification 53, 6.
Today, there is an increasing interest in automating the process of species
