Categorization of Plant and Insect Species via Shape Analysis

This chapter presents a graph-based approach to automatically categorize plant and insect species. In this approach, the plant leaf and insect objects are segmented from the background semi-automatically. For each object, the contour is then extracted, so that the contour points are used to form the vertices of a graph. We propose a vectorization method to recover clique histogram vectors from the graphs for classification. The clique histogram represents the distribution of one vertex with respect to its adjacent vertices. This treatment permits the use of a codebook approach to represent the graph in terms of a set of codewords that can be used for purposes of support vector machine classification. The experimental results show that the method is not only effective but also robust, and comparable with other methods in the literature for species recognition.