Quantitative descriptors for identifying plant species of urban landscape vegetation

Abstract

This paper discusses the ideas and methods of designing effective descriptors for identifying plant species of urban landscape vegetation. Fourteen of such descriptors induced from image spectrum, texture, and shape properties were designed. These descriptors were intended to meet such requirements as possessing a true physical or geometric implication relating to ecological significance, having a relatively steady segmentation threshold and being less sensitive to image types or environmental conditions during image acquisition. This study used decision trees to combine four selected descriptors for plant species identification, and the experiment was able to reach an error rate of 5.8% compared 25.9% by merely using the conventional pixel brightness values in plant species identification.