Deep BarkID: a portable tree bark identification system by knowledge distillation

Species identification is one of the key steps in the management and conservation planning of many forest ecosystems. We introduce Deep BarkID, a portable tree identification system that detects tree species from bark images. Existing bark identification systems rely heavily on massive computing power access, which may be scarce in many locations. Our approach is deployed as a smartphone application that does not require any connection to a database. Its intended use is in a forest, where internet connection is often unavailable. The tree bark identification is expressed as a bark image classification task, and it is implemented as a convolutional neural network (CNN). This research focuses on developing light-weight CNN models through knowledge distillation. Overall, we achieved 96.12% accuracy for tree species classification tasks for ten common tree species in Indiana, USA. We also captured and prepared thousands of bark images—a dataset that we call Indiana Bark Dataset—and we make it available at https://github.com/wufanyou/DBID.