Plant leaf identification using multi-scale fractal dimension

Abstract

Taxonomical classification of plants is a very complex and time-consuming task. This is mostly due to the great biodiversity of species and the fact of most measures extracted from plants are traditionally performed manually. This paper presents a novel approach to plant identification based on leaf texture. Initially, the texture is modelled as a surface, so complexity analysis using Multi-scale fractal dimension can be performed over the generated surface, resulting in a feature vector which represents texture complexity in terms of the spatial scale. Yielded results show the potential of the approach, which overcomes traditional texture analysis methods, such as Co-occurrence matrices, Gabor filters and Fourier descriptors. © 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.