In our previous study, we investigated the use of ensemble models based on LeNet and MiniVGGNet to classify the images of transverse and longitudinal surfaces of five Korean softwoods (cedar, cypress, Korean pine, Korean red pine, and larch). It had accomplished an average F1 score of more than 98%; the classification performance of the longitudinal surface image was still less than that of the transverse surface image. In this study, ensemble methods of two different convolutional neural network models (LeNet3 for smartphone camera images and NIRNet for NIR spectra) were applied to lumber species classification. Experimentally, the best classification performance was obtained by the averaging ensemble method of LeNet3 and NIRNet. The average F1 scores of the individual LeNet3 model and the individual NIRNet model were 91.98% and 85.94%, respectively. By the averaging ensemble method of LeNet3 and NIRNet, an average F1 score was increased to 95.31%.

Automatic wood species identification systems have enabled fast and accurate identification of wood species outside of specialized laboratories with well-trained experts on wood species identification. Conventional automatic wood species identification systems consist of two major parts: a feature extractor and a classifier. Feature extractors require hand-engineering to obtain optimal features to quantify the content of an image. A Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), which is one of the Deep Learning methods, trained for wood species can extract intrinsic feature representations and classify them correctly. It usually outperforms classifiers built on top of extracted features with a hand-tuning process.We developed an automatic wood species identification system utilizing CNN models such as LeNet, MiniVGGNet, and their variants. A smartphone camera was used for obtaining macroscopic images of rough sawn surfaces from cross sections of woods. Five Korean softwood species (cedar, cypress, Korean pine, Korean red pine, and larch) were under classification by the CNN models. The highest and most stable CNN model was LeNet3 that is two additional layers added to the original LeNet architecture. The accuracy of species identification by LeNet3 architecture for the five Korean softwood species was 99.3%. The result showed the automatic wood species identification system is sufficiently fast and accurate as well as small to be deployed to a mobile device such as a smartphone.