关键词: 植物分类, 叶片识别, 图像处理, 形状分析, 形状识别

Abstract: Plant is one of the main forms of life, and the number of the known plant species has reached about 400,000. The classification and identification of plants play an important role in biodiversity conservation, ecological agriculture and biological safety. Different species of plants usually have different leaf shapes, so the shape features provide key cue for plant classification. Leaf image recognition, as a significant application of computer vision, has received considerable attentions and has been made great progress in recent years. However, due to the issues of the huge amount of plant species, the large intra-class variance, the small inter-class differences and the leaf self-intersection, the leaf image recognition is still an unsolved problem. This paper presents a review over the existing shape based algorithms for leaf image recognition. In this review, the existing shape based leaf recognition algorithms are classified and several state-of-the-art algorithms of them are further analyzed and compared. The widely used leaf image databases and performance evaluation methods are also introduced. An experimental study on several types of representative shape based algorithms for leaf image recognition is also conducted. This paper not only presents a guide of applying the existing shape based algorithms for leaf recognition, but also gives a direction for developing novel algorithms of higher performance for leaf recognition.

Key words: plant classification, leaf recognition, image processing, shape analysis, shape recognition