Computer learns to identify leaves faster than a botanist - Futurity

Posted by A'ndrea Elyse Messer-Penn State on March 8, 2016 You are free to share this article under the Attribution 4.0 International license. Identifying an isolated leaf, especially if preserved as a fossil, can be a painstaking process for botanists. A new computer program that learns to categorize leaves into large evolutionary categories could help. Researchers "trained" a machine-learning algorithm to identify leaves based on a set of nearly 7,600 digital images of leaves that had been chemically treated to emphasize their shape and venation. The software discerned relevant patterns so well from that set of examples that it went on to identify the family of novel leaf images with greater than 70 percent accuracy (a rate 13 times better than chance) and the order with about 60 percent accuracy.