Fuzzy Deep Forest With Deep Contours Feature for Leaf Cultivar Classification

Deep learning is a compelling technique for feature extraction due to its adaptive capacity of processing and providing deeper image information. However, for the task of leaf cultivar classification, the deep learning-based classifier model is unable to extract contour features of leaf images deeply due to the lack of large specialized datasets and expert knowledge annotations. Also, the scale/size of the current leaf cultivar dataset does not meet the needs of deep neural networks (DNNs). In particular, the high model complexity of DNNs implies that deep-learning-based neural networks seem to must require a large dataset to achieve good performance, but facing the fact that the leaf cultivar dataset often is small, even some classes in this kind of datasets contain less than ten images/examples. To overcome these problems and inspired by the resounding success of fuzzy logic, we propose a novel fuzzy ensemble model for leaf cultivar classification. To extract the contours of leaves, we first propose generative adversarial networks-based methods. Second, to improve the ability of feature representation, we present a data augmentation method to transform our contour features. Third, to get the essential features of leaves, we design a novel generation of the fuzzy random forest. Finally, to achieve accurate classification, we design a novel deep learning strategy, namely deep fuzzy representation learning, integrating and cascading a lot of our fuzzy random forests. Experimental results show that our model outperforms other existing state-of-the-arts on three real-world datasets, and performs much better than the original deep forest and DNN-based algorithms particularly.