2019 3rd International Conference on Informatics and Computational Sciences (ICICoS)

Deep Convolutional Adversarial Network-Based

Feature Learning for Tea Clones Identifications
Endang Suryawati Vicky Zilvan R. Sandra Yuwana
Research Center for Informatics Research Center for Informatics Research Center for Informatics
Indonesian Institute of Sciences (LIPI) Indonesian Institute of Sciences (LIPI) Indonesian Institute of Sciences (LIPI)
Bandung, Indonesia Bandung, Indonesia Bandung, Indonesia
enda029@lipi.go.id vick001@lipi.go.id rade014@lipi.go.id

Ana Heryana Dadan Rohdiana Hilman F. Pardede

Research Center for Informatics
Indonesian Institute of Sciences (LIPI)
Bandung, Indonesia
anah0021@lipi.go.id
Research Institute for Tea and Cinchona Research Center for Informatics
Indonesian Agency for Indonesian Institute of Sciences (LIPI)
Agricultural Research and Development Bandung, Indonesia
Gambung, Indonesia hilm001@lipi.go.id
rohdiana@ritc.id

Abstract—Tea is a commodity has a strategic role in the
Indonesian economy. The cultivation of tea plants becomes very
important in order to maintain the superior commodity, with
respect to increase the production and/or improve the quality
of tea. In a tea plantation management system, it is essential to
identify the types of tea clones planted in the field. But, it requires
human experts to distinguish one types of clones with another.
The existence of an automatic clones identification is expected to
make the identification easy, fast, accurate, and easily accessible
for common farmers. In this work, we propose an unsupervised
feature learning algorithm derived from Deep Convolutional
Generative Adversarial Network (DCGAN) for automatic tea
clone identification. The use of unsupervised learning enable us to
utilize unlabeled data. Our experiments suggest the effectiveness
of our method for tea clones detection task.
Index Terms—Generative Adversarial Network, feature learn-
ing, object recognition, Convolutional Neural Network, DCGAN
I. I NTRODUCTION
Tea is one of the favorite drinks in the world, including
Indonesia. This commodity has a strategic role in the Indone-
sian economy. The demand for tea production, which increases
every year, make tea as an important commodity that may
affect the country’s foreign exchange sources. Attention to the
cultivation of tea plants becomes very important in order to
maintain the superiority among other countries. A lot of efforts
have been made to produce tea clones with good production
rate and/or high quality of tea. Superior clones are the ones
with high productivity, resistant to pests and diseases, tolerant
of drought, and high catechin content. The Tea and Quinine
Research Center Institute has developed a variety of superior
tea clones. The clones are called as the GMB (Gambung)
Clone series. Some of them are superior clones of GMB 1-11
tea series of Assamica varieties and superior clones of GMBS
1-5 series of Sinensis varieties.
In a tea plantation management system, which allows one
clone to be cross-breed with other clones, it is essential to
identify each type of tea clone planted in a field. The GMB
clones can be identified visually through physical size, texture,
bone structure, and leaf color. This identification process
requires experts to be able to distinguish between their char-
acteristics. In a plantation area, it is a high effort to identify
superior tea clones manually. The existence of the GMB clones
identification application automatically is expected to make
this identification task easy, fast, and accurate.
Automatic tea clone identification application can be de-
veloped using machine learning technologies as in object
recognition. Other applications of object recognition are face
recognition [1], [2], vehicle number plate recognition [3],
handwritten character recognition [4] etc. In agriculture, ob-
ject recognition application has been applied to inspect the
quality of agricultural products. Some of them are a machine
vision-based agricultural product grading system that has been
developed by Qinghua Su et al. to predict the potato feature
[5], the fruit grading system by Sapan Naik & Bankim Patel
[6], the strawberry grading system using K-means clustering
[7] and Support Vector Machine [8]. Meanwhile, Riyadi,
S. et al. [9]developed an estimation system of mangosteen
fruit maturity by using Support Vector Machine with RGB
features. For tea plants in particular, the application of image
object recognition has been applied to the identification of tea
leaf diseases using machine learning methods such as Sup-
port Vector Machine (SVM) [10] and multi-layer perceptron
(MLP) [11].
The successful application of machine learning techniques
in object recognition applications still has limitations when
they are used for general purposes due to data variations.
For conventional machine learning techniques, robust and
discriminative features are designed and extracted from image

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 2019 3rd International Conference on Informatics and Computational Sciences (ICICoS)
Fig. 1. The Original DCGAN Generator
data so that they are easily separated by a machine learning
algorithm through a feature extraction process. The process of
extracting features may require a sophisticated and complex
computational process.
Deep learning technology can provide solutions to the
limitations of conventional machine learning methods. Deep
learning technology [12] is a branch of machine learning
technology that has proven to be very useful for images,
sounds, videos. With predefined deep networks architectures,
we could train the network to automatically learn “good
features” from raw data. One architecture of deep learning
technology that has been widely applied to image data and
provides a satisfactory level of accuracy is Convolutional
neural network (CNN) [13]–[15]. Several applications for
detecting tea leaf disease, through images of tea leaves, have
also implemented deep learning techniques [16], [17].
Most of the object image recognition tasks still implement
supervised learning. Supervised learning provides satisfying
results, but deep learning usually requires large number of
labeled data. In reality, it is difficult to get large amounts of
labeled data, while there are a lot of unlabeled data around
us that should be able to be utilized. One way to utilize the
unlabeled data is to use unsupervised learning techniques. The
results of this unsupervised learning could be used as features,
and then object classification could be trained on supervised
learning techniques [12] with smaller number of labeled data.
There were several unsupervised feature learning techniques
proposed in previous studies in deep learning frameworks,
such as autoencoder [18], [19] and DCGAN [20].
In the previous studies, unsupervised features learning using
convolutional autoencoder for identification of tea diseases has
been implemented [18]. However, autoencoder tends to just
memorize input data and hence prone to overfit. Generative
adversarial network (GAN) [21] is a latest architecture in deep
learning. GAN works by competing two networks (called G
and D networks), where only D network knows the real data,
to each other so G network is able to predict the underlying
distributions of the real data without ever seeing it. Therefore,
we could avoid the network to overfit. GAN has also been
implemented using convolutional neural networks [20]. How-
ever, GAN is sensitive to initializations and the outcome of G
networks may be unpredictable.
In this paper, we propose encoder DCGAN for unsupervised
feature learning for tea clones identification applications. The
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idea is to feed both G and D networks with some knowledge
of the data instead of G network learn blindly. To do this
we append encoder network to DCGAN and then train it in
similar manner as normal GAN networks. Here, we only apply
the method for identification of two types of Gambung clones,
namely GMB 3 [22] and GMB 9 [23]. Representations of
features generated by the DCGAN architecture are used to
train supervised learning techniques. Our results show that the
proposed method outperform autoencoder.
This paper has structure as follows. Section II describes
DCGAN as an unsupervised feature learning. In Section III,
we describe our proposed method. The experimental setup is
briefly explained in Section IV. Section V describes the results
and discussion of these results. Section VI explains the main
conclusions and possible future work to be carried out.
II. D EEP C ONVOLUTIONAL G ENERATIVE A DVERSARIAL
N ETWORK AS U NSUPERVISED F EATURE L EARNING
Radford et al. tried to bridge the gap between the success of
the CNN architecture as supervised learning and unsupervised
learning, by carrying out the DCGAN (Deep Convolutional
Generative Adversarial Network) architecture. They build DC-
GAN by applying CNN to the GAN (Generative Adversarial
Network) architecture [21] to build an unsupervised represen-
tation learning model.
CNN is applied to the DCGAN architecture to replace the
multilayer perceptrons used by GAN. It is one way to over-
come the weaknesses of GAN, which is known to be unstable
in the training process. Other settings for stabilizing DCGAN
are replacing max-pooling layers with stride convolutions on
the discriminator and fractional-strided convolutions on the
generator, using batch normalization on the discriminator and
the generator to stabilize learning, using ReLU activation on
all layers in the generator except at the output (tanh) and using
LeakyReLU activation on all layers in the discriminator.
Figure 1 shows the DCGAN generator architecture. Input
generator is a uniform noise or random numbers in a 100-
dimensional vector. The convolutional representation form
(width, length, and many feature maps) is the projection result
of the input. The first projection is an l4x4x1024 layer, and the
final layer produces a 64x64 pixel image. The discriminator
reads this 64x64 pixel image, then learn whether the generated
images are real or fake.
 2019 3rd International Conference on Informatics and Computational Sciences (ICICoS)

Fig. 2. DCGAN networkas as features extractor for classification tasks.

Fig. 3. The proposed Generator of DCGAN

Fig. 4. The proposed Discriminator of DCGAN

Fig. 5. The Fully-Connected Classifier

III. T HE P ROPOSED M ETHOD

In Radford’s study, image classification tasks use the dis-
criminator model while G networks as feature extractor. Fea-
tures on all discriminator layers are flattened and concatenated
on vector dimension 28672. Then the L2-SVM classifier is
trained on these features. Finally, the L2-SVM classifier shows
that the DCGAN model can outperform the performance of all
K-means based approaches with an accuracy of 84.3% and a
smaller number of features (512).
In this study, we propose a feature learning architecture
by appending encoder into the DCGAN network as a feature
extractor to identify Gambung tea clones. IN DCGAN, as G
never really “see” the data, it is very sensitive to initialization.
There are a few different configurations between our architec-
ture and their architecture. Fig. 2 shows the proposed DCGAN
architecture as a feature learning for classification tasks.

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 2019 3rd International Conference on Informatics and Computational Sciences (ICICoS)

DCGAN handles the features learning process of the object.

DCGAN consists of generator and discriminator networks.
Generator learns features of the image through a presumptive
distribution of the data and generates an image based on
this distribution. The discriminator assesses the generated
images and decides whether they are real or fake images.
Both networks are trained in adversarial manner. Based on
the result of the discriminator assessment, the generator adapt
the presumptive distributions to generate better images until
the discriminator cannot distinguish between the real image Fig. 6. Sample of GMB 3 and GMB 9 images
or the fake image. In our method, we append encoder at the
top of the Generator network, so the Generator in some sense, TABLE I
T HE CLASSIFIER PERFORMANCE WHEN USING ENCODER DCGAN AS THE
could have better initialization for presumptive distributions. FEATURE LEARNING MODEL WITH A VARIATED CLASSIFIER LEARNING
Fig. 3 shows the proposed generator architecture. The input RATE
generator is a 64x64x16 and flattened into a 32768 vector,
and we reshape this vector into the 8x8x512 tensor. Then Learning Rate Performance Number of feature learning epochs
some convolution processes map the 8x8x512 input into the 500 1000 1500 2000
64x64x3 output. The discriminator shown in Fig. 4 consists of Adam(1e-3) Accuracy 83.47 85.95 80.99 86.78
Loss 0.86 0.69 0.61 0.48
three convolution layers, three dropout layers, one flatten layer, Adam(1e-4) Accuracy 76.00 86.78 84.30 85.95
and one fully-connected layer with a sigmoid function for Loss 0.75 0.42 0.69 0.38
the classification stage. The discriminator receives a 64x64x3 Adam(1e-5) Accuracy 82.64 87.60 84.30 91.74
Loss 0.40 0.35 0.43 0.32
input to undergo several convolution processes. The classifier
(Fig. 5 ) has one flatten layer and the last three fully-connected
layers of VGG architecture without dropout layers. TABLE II
T HE PERFORMANCE COMPARISON OF THE CLASSIFIER WHEN USING THE
IV. E XPERIMENTAL S ETUP DIFFERENT ARCHITECTURES OF FEATURE LEARNING

In our experiment, we use images of Gambung Clone

dataset. This dataset consists of two types of Gambung clone,
they are GMB 3 and GMB 9. Fig. 6 shows the sample images
of both of clone types. At first glance, they look similar, but
actually, they have a difference in shape, size, texture, and
color. We take the leaves pictures and collect them according
to their class. A total of the dataset is 1297 leave images.
We divided the dataset into three groups: training, testing, and
validation. 80% of the dataset is used for training data and
the rest (20%) of the dataset for a testing data. For validation
data, we use 10% of testing data. There is no pre-processing
for each image, except reduce the image to 64x64.
For experiments, we train the DCGAN by using the ar-
chitectures of generator and discriminator such as shown in
Fig. 3 and Fig. 4 to build the feature learning model first.
After DCGAN is trained, we use G as feature extractor and
the output G will be fed as features to fully-connected layers
(Fig. 5) for classification.
For the feature learning process, this experiment uses the
various number of epochs: 500, 100, 1500, and 2000. We
use Adam optimizer with the learning rate is 0.0002 and
momentum of 0.5. For encoder, we use a latent dimension
of 100, and a batch size of 128. In the classification task, we
use the various learning rate of Adam optimizer (1e−3, 1e−4,
1e − 5), the batch size of 128, and train the classifier during
2 epochs.
In the same scheme, we build the feature learning model
with use two autoencoders architecture as our baselines. These
autoencoders refer to Pardede et al. [18]. They are fully-
connected (MLP) autoencoder and convolutional autoencoder.
Architecture Accuracy (%) Loss
proposed encoder DCGAN 91.74 0.32
fully-connected Autoencoder 60.33 0.66
convolutional Autoencoder 72.73 0.58
We also evaluate each model by the same classifier. The
setting of feature learning parameters, which is used in the
DCGAN architecture and gives the best performance for the
classification task, will reuse by autoencoders for the same
task. The best parameter settings are 2000 feature learning
epochs at the classifier learning rate of 1e − 5.
V. R ESULTS AND D ISCUSSIONS
Table I shows the performance of the fully-connected layer
classifier with the various learning rate, and use an encoder
DCGAN as the feature learning model. The classifier achieves
the best performance once the feature learning model is trained
during 2000 epochs and the classifier use a learning rate
of 1e − 5. This configuration achieves the highest accu-
racy (97.74%) and the lowest loss (0.32) among the other
configurations, which is shown in Table I. The results in
Tabel I also show that overall configuration gives a satisfactory
performance with an accuracy value of above 82%, except
once the feature learning model is trained using the epoch
number of 500 and the classifier learning rate of 1e − 4. This
configuration gives the accuracy of 76 % and a loss of 0.75.
There is a tendency that the number of epochs affects
the performance of the model. The highest performance is

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 2019 3rd International Conference on Informatics and Computational Sciences (ICICoS)
achieved when the model is trained using the highest number
of epochs (2000) for all variations of the classifier learning
rate. However, it cannot be concluded that an increase in the
number of epochs increases the performance of the model
linearly. Nevertheless, the experimental results show that the
increase in accuracy occurs when the number of epochs
increases from 500 to 1000. Accuracy decreases when the
model is trained using the number of epochs 1500 and increase
again when the model is trained during 2000 epochs.
In our experiment, the selection of the best learning rate
classifier is 1e−5, as the model gives the highest performance
and the lowest loss. The choice of the learning rate may affect
the optimum number of epochs as the learning rate may affect
on how fast the model to converge. The learning rate controls
how the model responds to the problem by estimating the
error gradient after updating the model’s weights. Choosing
the learning rate can be a challenge in the building model
process.
Our proposed encoder DCGAN architecture supports the
classifier to give better performance than using autoencoder
architectures as a feature learning model, as shown in Table
Tabel II. Each of autoencoder is trained using the same number
of epochs as DCGAN. It indicates that with the same number
of training epochs, the encoder DCGAN tends to converge
faster than the autoencoder.
VI. C ONCLUSIONS
In this study, we proposed Encoder-Deep Convolutional
Generative Adversarial Network as the unsupervised feature
learning for tea clone identification tasks. Encoder is put
at the top of Generator to produce features for three fully-
connected layers Classifier. The result show that DCGAN
architecture can give better results compared autoencoder as
feature learning.
In the future, we also would like to investigate various
deep learning architectures to improve the performance of
our unsupervised feature learning architectures. Adding more
training data, depth of the encoder, or variations on the encoder
are among our interest for future studies.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
This paper is partially funded by Insinas Grant 2019
(Contract Number: 091/P/PRL-LIPI/INSINAS-1/II/2019) from
Indonesian Ministry of Research, Technology, and Higher
Education. This experiments on this research are conducted
on High Performance Computing (HPC) facility in Research
Center for Informatics, Indonsiaan Institute of Sciences. We
thank our fellow researchers in the Research Center for
Informatics- LIPI which has provided assistance in this study.
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