Segmentation and Identification of Mediterranean Plant Species

Recently, object recognition and image segmentation have gained much attention in the computer vision field and image process- ing for effective object localisation and identification. Researchers have applied semantic segmentation and instance segmentation in diverse application areas. However, the least research has been performed in nat- ural habitat monitoring or plant species identification in natural environ- ments/surroundings. For this study, we composed a real image dataset from four habitats: forests, dunes, grasslands, and screes from various locations in Italy. Habitat expert botanists annotated the data using bounding box annotations which have been further utilised to generate the plant species masks using the recently proposed Segment Anything Model (SAM) for segmentation, localisation, and identification tasks. Extensive experimentation has been performed on habitat data with bounding boxes and masks using YOLOv8 detection and segmentation models. Comparative analysis of models, model training with different train data percentages, and the importance of masks over bounding boxes have been studied and discussed.