Computer-Aided Plant Species Identification (CAPSI) Based on Leaf Shape Matching Technique

Abstract

In this paper, an efficient computer-aided plant species identification (CAPSI) approach is proposed, which is based on plant leaf images using a shape matching technique. Firstly, a Douglas - Peucker approximation algorithm is adopted to the original leaf shapes and a new shape representation is used to form the sequence of invariant attributes. Then a modified dynamic programming (MDP) algorithm for shape matching is proposed for the plant leaf recognition. Finally, the superiority of our proposed method over traditional approaches to plant species identification is demonstrated by experiment. The experimental result showed that our proposed algorithm for leaf shape matching is very suitable for the recognition of not only intact but also partial, distorted and overlapped plant leaves due to its robustness.