Improved wood species identification based on multi-view imagery of the three anatomical planes

Opening the black box: explainable deep-learning classification of wood microscopic image of endangered tree species

BACKGROUND

Traditional method of wood species identification involves the use of hand lens by wood anatomists, which is a time-consuming method that usually identifies only at the genetic level. Computer vision method can achieve "species" level identification but cannot provide an explanation on what features are used for the identification. Thus, in this study, we used computer vision methods coupled with deep learning to reveal interspecific differences between closely related tree species.

RESULT

A total of 850 images were collected from the cross and tangential sections of 15 wood species. These images were used to construct a deep-learning model to discriminate wood species, and a classification accuracy of 99.3% was obtained. The key features between species in machine identification were targeted by feature visualization methods, mainly the axial parenchyma arrangements and vessel in cross section and the wood ray in tangential section. Moreover, the degree of importance of the vessels of different tree species in the cross-section images was determined by the manual feature labeling method. The results showed that vessels play an important role in the identification of Dalbergia, Pterocarpus, Swartzia, Carapa, and Cedrela, but exhibited limited resolutions on discriminating Swietenia species.

CONCLUSION

The research results provide a computer-assisted tool for identifying endangered tree species in laboratory scenarios, which can be used to combat illegal logging and related trade and contribute to the implementation of CITES convention and the conservation of global biodiversity.

Plant microphenotype: from innovative imaging to computational analysis

The microphenotype plays a key role in bridging the gap between the genotype and the complex macro phenotype. In this article, we review the advances in data acquisition and the intelligent analysis of plant microphenotyping and present applications of microphenotyping in plant science over the past two decades. We then point out several challenges in this field and suggest that cross-scale image acquisition strategies, powerful artificial intelligence algorithms, advanced genetic analysis, and computational phenotyping need to be established and performed to better understand interactions among genotype, environment, and management. Microphenotyping has entered the era of Microphenotyping 3.0 and will largely advance functional genomics and plant science.

Sparse attention double-channel FCN network for numerical analysis tracheid features in larch

Understanding the macro-mechanical behavior of wood at the micro-scale is of great significance for the design of cell-wall-like composite materials and pulp papermaking. In order to predict tracheid mechanical properties and analyze its relationship with tracheid features, based on the FCN network model, a double-channel FCN network with sparse attention (D-SA-FCN) was designed by introducing the double-channel mechanism and the sparse attention mechanism. The features of tracheid of larch were extracted numerically and the data set was established by using the compression strength data, the gray level co-occurrence matrix, cell segmentation and geometric analysis. A feature analysis algorithm based on PCA and random forest was established to optimize the feature values. The training set accuracy of the D-SA-FCN network model reached 85.75% with the five-level mechanical property level according to the classification standard. The accuracy of the training model is 71.48% and 79.52% when the morphological and texture features are input respectively. The results show that texture features had a more significant impact on mechanics to a certain extent and the D-SA-FCN could reduce the computational complexity and improve the prediction accuracy.