Convolutional variational autoencoder-based feature learning for automatic tea clone recognition

It is common to have various clones from cross-seedlings or unintended planting by the farmers in a tea plantation. Since each tea clone has distinctive features such as quality, resistance to diseases, etc., visual inspections are usually conducted on the plantations to segment areas with different tea clones within the plantation to produce crops with consistent quality. However, this would be costly and time-consuming. In this work, we apply machine learning and develop an application to recognize tea clones automatically. We propose a convolutional variational autoencoder-based feature learning algorithm to produce robust features against data distortions. There are two main advantages of using this algorithm for feature learning. First, there is no need to design complex handcrafted features for classifications, usually conducted in machine learning. Second, the resulting features are more robust when tested with data taken from unideal conditions. The proposed method is evaluated using the original and the distorted image. Our proposed method achieves the best performance of 0.83 (83%) for the original image test, 0.75 (75%) for the gaussian blur image test, and 0.78 (78%) for the median blur image test. This is a much more robust result than VGGNet16, a popular supervised deep convolutional neural network. (C) 2021 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. on behalf of King Saud University.