CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION

Background of the Study

In this era, though there are many advance modern medicines that emerge, there is

a marked revival of interest with respect to medicine and traditional pharmacopoeia.

Affordable and easy to access are some of the several advantages of a traditional

medicinal plant (Betti et al., 2018). Like aspirin, an example of a modern medicine, is

produced indirectly from medicinal plants. While studying medicinal plants, it can help

understand plant’s toxicity and protect human and animals from natural poisons. Also,

cultivation and preservation of medicinal plants protect biological diversity; a good

example is the metabolic engineering of plants (Plant Biology, n.d.).

Here in the Philippines, there are only ten (10) medicinal plants approved and

recommended for use by the government’s Department of Health (Penecilla, G. &

Magno, C., n.d.). Filipinos oftentimes cannot buy manufactured synthetic drugs due to its

high price. The passage of Republic Act No. 8423, otherwise known as “Traditional

Alternative Medicine Act (TAMA)” in December 7, 2019 answers the people’s present

needs on health care by providing and delivering Traditional and Alternative Health Care

(PAHC) products, services, and technologies that have been safe, effective, affordable

and accessible for Filipinos. However, the Philippine Herbal Medicine Industry,

compared with China, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam, is not yet well-developed (Jose, 2019).

In addition, many people still do not know that some of the plants they have in their

garden are herbal.

 To widen Filipino’s knowledge about herbal plants, the researcher came up with

an idea to develop an Android application called “Herbentify”. The user will capture an

image of a leaf from a plant and the application will process the image resulting to the

summarization of the plant’s name (scientific name, common names, and other

vernacular names), properties, usage, availability, and its indication. The application

identifies the image captured as herbal or not depending on its offline reference which is

acquired from the online database if internet connectivity is present.

Statement of the Study

The continuous fluctuation of the number of herbs varieties is a serious problem.

At the present, it is important to conserve herbs for it to be useful up until the next

generations but the problem is even the botanists doesn’t have an efficient tool to identify

different herbs. Collecting information about a specific herb is still difficult because of

the scarcity of resources. Nowadays, identifying a herb consume time because there is

still no efficient tool that can be utilize to produce a precise detail and accessible data. To

resolve the problems mentioned above, this project aims to implement a system that is

used to recognize herds just by using an image.

Objectives of the Study

In general, the capstone project aims to use the concept of machine learning in

order to give and provide an accurate identification of herbal plants.

Specific objectives of the capstone project are the following:

 1. Develop a system that will serve as a repository of the different information about

herbal plants;

2. Develop a system that will be used to find and gather herbs detail using only its

image; and

3. Develop a system that will be able to provide the people with details about the

plant, such as, the plant’s name (scientific name, common names, and other

vernacular names), properties, usage, availability, and its indication

Scope and Limitation

The app will consist of a camera which captures the image of the leaf and process

it in order to generate a textual detailing about the name of the herb, its uses and

availability. The result produced by the system is highly dependent on the brightness,

contrast of the background where application is used. To have an accurate result, the user

must take or provide an image with the resolution that is need for the image to be

recognized and classified by the system correctly.

Significance of the Study

Botanist. The application will help them immediately identify the herbal plants just by

using an image. This helps them save time spent in their researches.

Other Users. The app will highly benefit those who have difficulty in identifying herbal

plant. This will benefit them because the app is easy to use only that the users need to

meet the resolution of the image needed to have a correct result.

Researchers. The capstone project is a challenge on the part of the researchers for it

includes machine learning theories and application. The process and result of the

capstone project will give the researchers an additional knowledge as well.

Future Researchers. The project is very beneficial to the next batch of researchers for

they can use the output of this capstone project in building and upgrading a similar study

to this one.

Conceptual Framework

Figure 1. The Conceptual Framework

 As shown in Figure 1, there are nine steps in using the application. The nine steps

are discussed as follows: (1) “Herbentify” is an application used by the botanists and

future botanist, hikers, and common people for identifying (2) herbal plant’s leaf (3)

captured by the application using the mobile phone’s camera and (4) analyze the image

by using some of the algorithms in identifying the feature of the leaf. (5) After analyzing

the image, the application lists the nearest and possible plant information identified

during the analysis and every item in the list contains a (6) detailed information about the

plant item selected on the list. (7) The application has a feature that updates its references

from a web service that is used as the back end of the application. (8) The application

only updates: (i) during the first installation of the application, (ii) when internet

connection is available, and (iii) when the user manually initiates the update action (9)

During the application update, it downloads all the necessary files to update its references

for future use.

Operational Definition of Terms

Android App is a software designed to run on an Android device or emulator. The term

also refers to an APK file which stands for Android package. This file is a Zip archive

containing app code, resources, and meta information.

Image Processing. Is the analysis and manipulation of a digitized image, especially in

order to improve its quality to be used in the proposed application.

Herbal medicine, also called botanical medicine refers to using a plant's seeds, berries,

roots, leaves, bark, or flowers for medicinal purposes. Herbalism has a long tradition of

use outside conventional medicine

Matlab. the name MATLAB stands for matrix laboratory. MATLAB was will be used as

image processing method to make the application work.

Vernacular name. Applied to a plant in the common native speech as distinguished from

the Latin nomenclature of scientific classification.

Scientific name. A name used by scientists, especially the taxonomic name of an

organism that consists of the genus and species

 CHAPTER 2

REVIEW RELATED LITERATURE

Literature shows that there has been considerable number of work that tackles leaf

recognition and identification but none of them tackles discrimination of herbal from

non-herbal leaves.

Leafsnap by F. Ledesma, P.L Madriaga, K. Omiple and E. Barrios (2019)for

example, allows users to identify tree species simply by taking a photograph of the

plant’s leaves. The current version of Leafsnap has covered 184 tree species of the

Northeastern side of the United States. It uses a visual recognition system for automatic

plant species identification. The recognition process include: leaf/non-leaf classification,

color-based segmentation, extraction and comparison. Leafsnap is only available for an

iOS mobile operating system and only shows the most likely candidate to the captured

image wherein the users will make the final identification.

Plant Leaf Recognition using Neural Networks (LeafRApp) J. Barbosa, KB Lee,

SW Lee, B. Lodhi (2020) is a desktop application which recognizes a plant from an input

image file using the plant leaf’s shape. The following are the techniques used in the

LeafRApp by D. Prasvita and Y. Herdiyeni. A hybrid of two modelling techniques is

used to extract features from the leaf; (2) Moment-Invariant method is used to extract the

first four moments of the image; (3) Centroid-Radii method, which is employed to extract

36 radii with the image’s centroid; and (4) Canny Edge Detection technique is utilized in
extracting the edges of the leaf images, which undergoes a pattern recognition process

using Multilayer Perceptron.

LeafRApp is a desktop application which is similar to Leafsnap, which also

produces a possible match from its plant leaf database within the percentage of its

matching cut off and then presented to the user according to its proximity to the leaf plant

image. However, canny edge detection is vulnerable to noise disturbances. Input leaf

images may contain noise due to illumination, which result to many false edges detected.

MedLeaf, by Billiauws, I. & Bonjean, K. (2020) on the other hand, is a new

mobile application for medicinal plants identification based on leaf image. The

application runs on Android operating system. It has two main functionalities: (1) to

identify medicinal plants; and (2) to search for documents of medicinal plant. It uses the

Local Binary Pattern to extract leaf texture and Probabilistic Neural Network to classify

the image. In this research, there were thirty (30) images of Indonesian medicinal plants

species used and each species consists of 48 digital leaf images. Nonetheless, it utilized

the leaf textures only as their parameters or features, which are in turn the basis for

medicinal leaf recognition with an accuracy of 56.33%.

Herbal Medicine Information System Using Push and Pull Technology in Mobile
Application

According to Mary Jane C. Samonte; Marianne Therese P. Cadiz; Berline Mae R.

Mabanag Camba; Genesis G. Esguerra (2020), push technology could be seen being used

when the information is generated by a central web server and then pushes it to a client.

A client may access this information through their personal computers, laptops, and

mobile phones. In contrast to Push technology, there is Pull technology. Pull technology
could be seen being used when a client requests information from a server. In this study,

the researchers developed an android-based mobile application, called HerbLife, that uses

push and pull technology in for alternative medicine information. The herbal solutions

app is ideal for use by people who would like to use plant-based medicines instead of the

chemical ones to avoid allergies and other medical dilemma. The technology applied is

ideal for offline connection especially in remote and rural areas where access is limited

and the mobile device has limited memory capacity. This research were able to present

information rich content in the form of video, text and other multimedia features in order

to fully covered the needed herbal solution instruction to present to the target users. The

presented plant-based medicinal information in this study were carefully selected and

tested by professional before developing this herbal information system. The mobile

application was tested with the fullest of its functionality and supported by user

acceptance testing of the experts in herbal medicines and proven users of this alternative

approach as shown in this study.

AR Plants: Herbal Plant Mobile Application utilizing Augmented Reality

According to the conference paper of Jean M. Angeles and Fredilyn B. Calanda

(2023) which intend to introduce a mobile application that provides information about

herbal plants commonly found in the Philippines utilizing augmented reality. All

information about herbal plants were provided by the Philippine Institute of Traditional

and Alternative Health Care (PITAHC) including its characteristics, scientific names,

vitamin content, uses, where to find it and procedure how to use it. For the development

of the mobile application, we used Unity software and Vuforia SDK as it may provide

many resources such as image converter, camera, tracker, video background renderer,
application code, user-defined targets, and device databases. We also used the Vuforia

QCAR algorithm that can identify the tracking points of the image target from the

database and will be used for augmentation of 3D models. In evaluating the acceptability

of AR Plants mobile application, a 5-point Likert-scaled questionnaire was designed and

validated by IT experts. With the total average mean of 4.29, it shows that the mobile

application is acceptable in terms suitability, accurateness, learnability, operability, time

behavior, resource utilization, and recovery. With the use of multimedia content and AR

technology, it can help the user to become aware, engage, and enhance his vision with

useful information about the surrounding environment. For future works, we recommend

to add additional kinds of herbal plants, provide a cloud database and to use a better

algorithm for identifying real-life targets.

 CHAPTER 3

METHODOLOGY

This chapter presents the methodology used in this study. The researcher will use

the Agile Methodology which was suitable to the project time frame as shown in the

figure below. This method will be used because the flow is very smooth and detail from

the start of the project, processing until the end. This method also described the whole

processing of the project from Requirement gathering and analysis, Design,

Implementation or coding, Testing, Deployment and Maintenance.

Work Breakdown Structure

ACTIVITY MONTH START FINISH

TASK

Requirement March 03/20/2024 03/30/2024

Gathering and
Analysis
Design April 04/20/2024 04/30/2024
Coding May 05/10/2024 07/30/2024
Testing August 08/10/2024 08/30/2024
Deployment September 09/10/2024 09/30/2024
 Maintenance November 11/06/2024 11/30/2024
Table 1. Work Breakdown Structure

Table 1 presents the Work Breakdown Structure of the Development of the

System from the month of March, 2024 up to November, 2024.

Research Design

The method of research used in this study will be descriptive. With the help of

this method, the researcher will be able to specify the needs of the developer and to give

solution to the problem. Descriptive Method allows the collection, analysis, classification

and tabulation of information from Sir Datu Jun Abu, Registered Microbiologist where

the developer will base their development of the said system.

Figure 2. Agile Methodology

Requirement Gathering and Analysis

The researcher will gather information about the project that would

determine whether the project is feasible or not. There were reviews of related literatures

or systems found online that would support the proposed research topic of the researcher.

Also, in this phase, the researcher recognized the scope and delimitations of the project.

OpenCV, which is one of the technologies that the researcher will used will also been

tested.

Design

More reviews of related literatures and systems were found. The researcher

verified the scope of the project and also the delimitations. The existing systems found

online were tested by the researcher in order to verify the non-existence of the proposed

project.

Implementation or Coding

The development of the application took place in this phase. The researchers

distributed the task among themselves. Some focused on improving the user interface

while some focused on the actual coding. It was during this phase when all the technical

preparations of the researchers were put into use

Testing

After the application will be developed, the researcher will release it to the end

users for it to be tested. The researcher will implement the black-box testing. This will
help the researcher find errors in the application. As there were some, the researcher will

fix them. At the end of this phase, the researcher will have the final version of the

application.

Deployment

This process involves actual implementation of the system to check and verify if

components are working properly based on the needs of the locale of the study.

Maintenance

After the deployment of the developed system on the production environment,

maintenance of it i.e. if any issue comes up and needs to be fixed or any enhancement is

to be done is taken care by the developer.

Flowchart of the Proposed Application

START
 Install App apk

Sure to install no
the application?

yes
App Dashboard Capture/upload Image

See Results

STOP

Figure 3. Flowchart of the Proposed Application

Figure 3 shows the Flowchart of the proposed mobile application. To use the

system, the user must install the apk of the application. After successfully installing, the

user will then When the user clicks the “Take a snap” button, it will lead him to a

window to take an image one at a time then see the result immediately or take multiple

images and upload them. That is, the user can either capture a leaf image (i.e., to press the

button with a camera icon) or upload a leaf photo from his gallery (i.e., to press the

button with a folder icon). When the user chooses the other option which is to “capture an

image” button, it will lead him directly to his camera’s phone and clicks OK if it’s good

to go and Retry to capture again.

Use Case Diagram

 Install application
apk

Capture/upload
Image

User See results

Figure 4. Use Case Diagram of the Developed System

As shown in the figure above, only the user is the actor of the proposed system.

He/she must install the apk of the developed application. Once installed, he/she can

capture or upload a certain picture of the herbal he/she wants to identify and after a few

seconds or minutes, the application will provide results.

Architectural Diagram
Figure 5. Architectural Diagram of the Proposed System

Figure 5 shows the Architectural Diagram of the Developed System that presents

the discriminates herbal from non-herbal leaves by applying data mining based on the

features and parameters extracted from the captured leaf image. Leaf images of a plant

may be collected and stored in the image database giving the user an option to let the

application perform the batch analysis or by individual leaf immediately after it has been

captured. The process starts by taking the leaf image or retrieving leaf images that have

been stored in the database. This is followed by image preprocessing and feature

extraction, which are necessary for herbal leaf recognition.

Respondents of the Study

The respondents of the study were the Faculty and Staff of the Cotabato

Foundation College of Science and Technology Pikit Extension Unit specifically from

the Department of Bachelor of Science in Agriculture.

Locale of the Study

The study will be conducted in Cotabato Foundation College of Science and

Technology Pikit Extension Unit. from March, 2024 to November, 2024.

System Requirements

 Hardware Specification:

The following were the minimum and recommended hardware specifications for the

implementation of the application.

 Android Phone

Software Specification

The specification software was important for the systems. The following were the

application software to be used by the researchers in developing the system.

 Eclipse Android Developer Tools (Eclipse ADT

 Android Operating System

 OpenCV
 REFERENCES

Android Developer Tools. Retrieved from http://developer. android.com/tools/index.html

Betti, J., et al. (2020). “An Ethnobotanical and Floristical Study of Medicinal Plants
among the Baka Pygmies in the Periphery of the Ipassa – Biosphere Reserve, Gabon”.
European Journal of Medicinal Plants, 3(2): 174 – 205, 2013.

Billiauws, I. & Bonjean, K. (n.d.). Image recognition on an Android mobile phone.

Retrieved from http://www.eavise.be/ mastertheses/BilliauwsBonjean.pdf

BrG Media, LLC. Retrieved from http://bgr.com/2012/11/02/ android-version-

distribution- gingerbread-october-2021/

Department of Health (n.d.). Republic Act No. 8423, Traditional and Alternative
Medicine Act, Philippine Institute of Traditional and Alternative Health Care (PITAHC).
Retrieved from pitahc. doh.gov.ph/Mandate.pdf

D. Prasvita and Y. Herdiyeni. “Medleaf Mobile Application for Medicinal Plant

Identification Based on Leaf Image”. Advanced Science Enginering Information
Technology. 2(2): 5–8, 2013.

Feature Matching, Basics of Brute-Force Matcher. Retrieved from

http://docs.opencv.org/trunk/doc/py_tutorials/py_feature 2d/py_matcher/py_matcher.html
Gandhewar, N. & sheikh, r. (n.d.). Google Android: An Emerging Software Platform For
Mobile Devices, International Journal on Computer Science and Engineering (IJCSE).
Retrieved from http://www.enggjournals.com/ijcse/doc/003- IJCSESP24.pdf

N. Jamil, N.A.C Hussin, S. Nordin and K. Awang, “Automatic Plant Identification: Is

Shape the Key Feature?” 2015 IEEE International Symposium on Robotics and
Intelligent Sensors (IRIS 2019).