Classifying Plant Leaves from Their Margins Using Dynamic Time Warping

Most plant species have unique leaves which differ from each other by characteristics such as the shape, colour, texture and the margin. Details of the leaf margin are an important feature in comparative plant biology, although they have largely overlooked in automated methods of classification. This paper presents a new method for classifying plants according to species, using only the leaf margins. This is achieved by utilizing the dynamic time warping (DTW) algorithm. A margin signature is extracted and the leaf's insertion point and apex are located. Using these as start points, the signatures are then compared using a version of the DTW algorithm. A classification accuracy of over 90% is attained on a dataset of 100 different species.