Identification of Medicinal Plants by Visual Characteristics of Leaves

Abstract

Plants Leaf play a vital role in human life, they provide oxygen, food, shelter, medicine, fuel, gums and environmental protection. Many plants are rich in medicinal values and contain active ingredients for medicinal use. Because of factor such as global warming, increasing population, professional secrecy, lack of Government support for research activities and lack of awareness about medicinal plants, many useful plants species are now becoming extinct and are getting destroyed. Manual identification of medicinal plants leaf is a time-consuming process and need the help of experts for plants identification. To overcome this problem automatic identification and classification of medicinal plants is needed for greater benefit to humankind. In today’s era, the automatic identification and classification of medicinal plants leaf is an active research area in the field of image processing. Feature extraction and classification are the main steps in identification of medicinal plants and classification process which affect the overall accuracy of the classification system. This paper presents literature on image processing techniques used in identification and classification of medicinal plants and also the importance and benefits of medicinal plants in recent years.