Fully automatic leaf-based plant identification, application for Vietnamese medicinal plant search

Abstract

Plant identification is an interesting and challenging research topic due to the variety of plant species. Among different parts of the plant, leaf is widely used for plant identification because it is usually the most abundant type of data available in botanical reference collections and the easiest to obtain in the field studies. A number of works have been done for plant leaf identification. However, this topic is still an open research topic. Recently, kernel descriptor (KDES) has been proposed and proved to be robust for many object recognition applications. In [1], we have proposed to use this descriptor for leaf-based plant identification. The contributions of this paper are three-fold. Firstly, we present improved kernel descriptor. Secondly, we propose a fully automatic leaf-based plant identification method consisting of petiole detection, plant leaf orientation normalization, and plant leaf identification. Finally, we introduce a new plant identification application on Android devices: Vietnamese medicinal plant search. This application provides both search modalities: text-based and image-based.