MedicPlant

Ceci est une application pour reconnaître les plantes médicinales qui sont disponibles à Maurice.

To facilitate the recognition and classification of both exotic and endemic medicinal

plant that are commonly used by Mauritians, we have developed a mobile application which can recognise seventy different plants from pictures of the plants. A convolutional neural network (CNN) based on the TensorFlow framework has been used to create the AI (artificial intelligence) model. The model was then integrated into a mobile application. The system has a recognition accuracy of more than 90%. Once the plant is recognised, a number of useful information is displayed to the user. Such information includes the common name of the plant, its English name and also its scientific name. The plant is also classified as either exotic or endemic followed by its medicinal applications and a short description. Contrary to similar systems, our application does not require an internet connection to work. This research could be extended in three main ways. Firstly, we could gather more images for each plant for the current list of plants and then build a more accurate model for the recognition. Secondly, we could increase the dataset to cover more than one hundred different medicinal plants and thirdly additional information about each plant could be provided to the user. These extensions would enhance the usability of the mobile application. It is expected that this mobile application will help the Mauritian population to increase their familiarity on medicinal plants, help taxonomists to experiment with new ways of identifying plant species, attract pharmaceutical industries to exploit same as potential therapeutics bio-products, and will also contribute significantly in the protection of endangered species.