Leaf shape based plant species recognition

Plant has plenty use in foodstuff, medicine and industry. And it is also vitally important for environmental protection. However, it is an important and difficult task to recognize plant species on earth. Designing a convenient and automatic recognition system of plants is necessary and useful since it can facilitate fast classifying plants, and understanding and managing them. In this paper, a leaf database from different plants is firstly constructed. Then, a new classification method, referred to as move median centers (MMC) hypersphere classifier, for the leaf database based on digital morphological feature is proposed. The proposed method is more robust than the one based on contour features since those significant curvature points are hard to find. Finally, the efficiency and effectiveness of the proposed method in recognizing different plants is demonstrated by experiments. (c) 2006 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.