A Plant Identification System using Shape and Morphological Features on Segmented Leaflets: Team IITK, CLEF 2012

Automatic plant identification tasks have witnessed increased interest from the machine learning community in recent years. This paper describes our (team IITK’s) participation in the Plant Identification Task, CLEF 2012, organized by the Combined Lab Evaluation Forum (CLEF) where the challenge was to identify plant species based on leaf images. We first categorize the different types of images and then use a variety of novel preprocessing methods such as shadow and background correction, petiole removal and automatic leaflet segmentation for identifying the leaf blobs. We next use complex network framework along with novel tooth detection method and morphological operations to compute several useful features. Finally, we use a random forest for classification. Based on the proposed approach, we achieved 2 rank on the overall score in the competition.