Specialized measures of leaf outlines and hierarchical perceptrons in an automatic identification of plants
The development of an efficient image-based computer identification system for plants or other organisms is an important ambitious goal, which is still far from realization. This paper presents three new methods potentially usable for such a system: fractal-based measures of complexity of leaf outline, a heuristic algorithm for automatic detection of leaf parts - the blade and the petiole, and a hierarchical perceptron - a kind of neural network classifier. The next few sets of automatically extractable features of leaf blades, encompassed those presented and/or traditionally used, are compared in the task of plant identification using the simplest known "nearest neighbor" identification algorithm, and more realistic neural network classifiers, especially the hierarchical. We show on two real data sets that the presented techniques are really usable for automatic identification, and are worthy of further investigation.
fractal dimensions artificial neural networks pattern analysis biometry computer keys