Study of Various Techniques for Medicinal Plant Identification

Abstract

Ayurveda, the Indian ancient medicinal system, has gained importance because of its effectiveness in treating diseases. Medicinal plants are used in Ayurvedic medicines since ancient times. It is necessary to classify these plants so that it would be easy to select the right plant for the medicinal preparation or to study more about its characteristics. Identification is the pre-condition of classification of medicinal plant. In this paper, we have reviewed Image processing Near-Infrared Spectroscopy (NIRS), taxonomic key repository, neural network and DeoxyriboNucleic Acid (DNA) barcoding. The study shows that image processing is leading domain in identification of medicinal plant. The results are improved when multiple methods are used together in a sequence to identify a medicinal plant. Apart from that none of these methods are using geographical information to identify medicinal plants and we can use geographical Information System (GIS) information to improve its accuracy further.