A CNN Model for Herb Identification Based on Part Priority Attention Mechanism

Automated herb identification plays an important role in protecting and investigating the herbs for botanists, which has been widely applied in the field of cosmetic, medical and food industry areas. Traditionally, due to the complicated background and various herb patterns, herb discriminative feature extractions is a hard work. And some existing methods may not be applicable when the herbs exist in actual wild environment. Therefore, how to locate the valid herb regions and extract the effective features is an open issue. In this paper, a novel CNN model is proposed for herb identification by using the part-information perception module (PPM) and species classification module (SCM). A new attention mechanism, namely part priority attention mechanism (PPAM), is proposed by training PPM independently with herb part labels. It should be pointed out that the proposed PPAM can guide the model to focus on the position of herb parts and suppress the irrelevant noisy regions. Moreover, depthwise separable convolution and label smoothing technique are introduced to decrease the model complexity and regularize the impact of mistake labels. In the experiment part, a large-scale herb dataset is constructed, which consists many kinds of challenging herb species in the wild environment. Additionally, these images contains both species labels and part labels. Experimental results demonstrate that our model achieves obviously improvement in term of accuracy and model size compared with other classical deep learning models.