LeafIQ: A Hybrid Deep Learning Framework for Medicinal Leaf Classification Using EfficientNet-B1 and GLCM Texture Feature
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Abstract
Traditional health care systems such as Ayurveda, Siddha, and Unani need the identification of medicinal leaves. However, manual recognition is challenging due to similarity between species. Most existing work depends on traditional Convolution Neural Network (CNNs) and handcrafted features which perform poor on noised image and similar leaves. In this paper, a hybrid deep learning model called LeafIQ (Leaf Intelligence Quotient) using EfficientNet-B1 and advanced Gray Level Co-occurrence Matrix (GLCM). EfficientNet-B1 model is used for image classification and feature extraction. GLCM is the texture feature extraction technique for accurate extraction of texture. The deep feature vector and the texture feature vector is fused for accurate classification. Gradient-weighted Class Activation Mapping (Grad-CAM) is an Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) used for visually represent the important part of the leaf image. By analysing the images of 30 different plant species, the results show that combined deep features and texture features helps to identify the leaves better. As a result, this framework gives accuracy of 99.82% and reliable classification. LeafIQ is deployed as a Flask web application with a professional chat-style interface supporting Gemini AI integration, YouTube plant search, Tamil–English bilingual output, and Grad-CAM visual explanations.
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