Identification of Indian butterflies using Deep Convolutional Neural Network

The conventional butterfly identification method is based on their different morphological characters namely wing-venation, color, shape, patterns and through the dissection studies and molecular techniques which are tedious, expensive and highly time-consuming. To overcome the above aforesaid challenges, a new butterfly identification system using butterfly images has been designed to instantly identify the butterfly with high accuracy. In this study, we construct a new butterfly dataset with 34,024 butterfly images belonging to 315 species from India. We propose and prove the effectiveness of new data augmentation techniques on our dataset. To identify butterflies using photographic images, we built eleven new Deep Convolutional Neural Network (DCNN) butterfly classifier models using eleven pre-trained architectures namely ResNet-18, ResNet-34, ResNet-50, ResNet-121, ResNet-152, Alex-Net, DenseNet-121, DenseNet-161, VGG-16, VGG-19 and SqueezeNet-v1.1. The different model's classification results were compared and the proposed technique achieved a maximum top-1 accuracy(94.44%), top-3 accuracy(98.46%) and top-5 accuracy(99.09%) using ResNet-152 model, followed by DenseNet-161 model achieved the top-1 accuracy(94.31%), top-3 accuracy (98.07%) and top-5 accuracy (98.66%). The results suggest that models can be assertively used to identify butterflies in India.