A Learning Robust and Discriminative Shape Descriptor for Plant Species Identification

Plant identification based on leaf images is a widely concerned application field in artificial intelligence and botany. The key problem is extracting robust discriminative features from leaf images and assigning a measure of similarity. This study proposes an effective, robust shape descriptor to identify plant species from images of their leaves, which we call the high-level triangle shape descriptor (HTSD). First, we extract a leaf image’s external contour and internal salient point information. We then use triangle features to describe the leaf contour, which we call the contour point based on triangle features (CPTFs). The internal information of the leaf image is based on salient point triangle features (SPTFs). The third step is to apply the Fisher vector to encode the two kinds of point-based local triangle features into the HTSD. Finally, we employ the simple euclidean distance to calculate the dissimilarities between the HTSD characteristics of leaf images. We have extensively evaluated the proposed approach on several public leaf datasets successfully. Experimental results show that our method has superior recognition accuracy, outperforming current state-of-the-art shape-based and deep-learning plant identification approaches.