Fast Leaf Recognition and Retrieval Using Muti-Scale Angular Description Method

Recognizing plant species based on leaf images is challenging because of the large inter-class variation and inter-class similarities among different plant species. The effective extraction of leaf descriptors constitutes the most important problem in plant leaf recognition. In this paper, a multi-scale angular description method is proposed for fast and accurate leaf recognition and retrieval tasks. The proposed method uses a novel scale-generation rule to develop an angular description of leaf contours. It is parameter-free and can capture leaf features from coarse to fine at multiple scales. A fast Fourier transform is used to make the descriptor compact and is effective in matching samples. Both support vector machine and k-nearest neighbors are used to classify leaves. Leaf recognition and retrieval experiments were conducted on three challenging datasets, namely Swedish leaf, Flavia leaf, and ImageCLEF2012 leaf. The results are evaluated with the widely used standard metrics and compared with several state-of-the-art methods. The results and comparisons show that the proposed method not only requires a low computational time, but also achieves good recognition and retrieval accuracies on challenging datasets.