Automatic Leaf Extraction from Outdoor Images

Automatic plant recognition and disease analysis may be streamlined by an image of a complete, isolated leaf as an initial input. Segmenting leaves from natural images is a hard problem. Cluttered and complex backgrounds: often composed of other leaves are commonplace. Furthermore, their appearance is highly dependent upon illumination and viewing perspective. In order to address these issues we propose a methodology which exploits the leaves venous systems in tandem with other low level features. Background and leaf markers are created using colour, intensity and texture. Two approaches are investigated: watershed and graph–cut and results compared. Primary-secondary vein detection and a protrusion-notch removal are applied to refine the extracted leaf. The efficacy of our approach is demonstrated against existing work.