Classification and Recognition of Urban Tree Defects in a Small Dataset using Convolutional Neural Network, Resnet-50 Architecture, and Data Augmentation

Identifying hazard trees in urban setup is a time-consuming and tedious task and therefore concerned organizations and homeowner associations may not identify and fix such hazard trees in time. The purpose of this study was to identify the type of defects in the trees with the use of convolutional neural networks. This technology could speed up the process of identifying hazard trees. The study used the Image Processing Toolbox of MATLAB 2019a to process and classifies the images into one of the seven most prominent types of tree defects. The CNN used for this classification was ResNet-50. The Tree Defects dataset was prepared from images from publicly available sources. Further, the accuracy of the classification of these images into each of the defect categories was tested by obtaining a confusion matrix. The performance of ResNet-50 architecture was compared on three more publicly available and common research datasets Caltech101, Flower, and Dogs. The novel Tree Defects dataset was very small and had only 298 images. For its effectiveness on smaller datasets, ResNet-50 architecture was used along with data augmentation of tree defects images by rotating them 90-degrees clockwise and anti-clockwise. The effect of the proportion of the training dataset on model performance was also evaluated by training the model on 70%, 80%, and 90% of the total images in the dataset. The augmented Tree Defects dataset had 894 images. The model performance improves by 43.56% on the augmented Tree Defects dataset. The augmented model achieved the highest classification accuracy of 91.48%.