Plant Image Classification with Nonlinear Motion Deblurring Based on Deep Learning

Despite the significant number of classification studies conducted using plant images, studies on nonlinear motion blur are limited. In general, motion blur results from movements of the hands of a person holding a camera for capturing plant images, or when the plant moves owing to wind while the camera is stationary. When these two cases occur simultaneously, nonlinear motion blur is highly probable. Therefore, a novel deep learning-based classification method applied on plant images with various nonlinear motion blurs is proposed. In addition, this study proposes a generative adversarial network-based method to reduce nonlinear motion blur; accordingly, the method is explored for improving classification performance. Herein, experiments are conducted using a self-collected visible light images dataset. Evidently, nonlinear motion deblurring results in a structural similarity index measure (SSIM) of 73.1 and a peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) of 21.55, whereas plant classification results in a top-1 accuracy of 90.09% and F1-score of 84.84%. In addition, the experiment conducted using two types of open datasets resulted in PSNRs of 20.84 and 21.02 and SSIMs of 72.96 and 72.86, respectively. The proposed method of plant classification results in top-1 accuracies of 89.79% and 82.21% and F1-scores of 84% and 76.52%, respectively. Thus, the proposed network produces higher accuracies than the existing state-of-the-art methods.