Complex background leaf-based plant identification method based on interactive segmentation and kernel descriptor

This paper presents a plant identification method from the images of the simple leaf with complex background. In order to extract leaf from the image, we firstly develop an interactive image segmentation for mobile device with tactile screen. This allows to separate the leaf region from the complex background image in few manipulations. Then, we extract the kernel descriptor from the leaf region to build leaf representation. Since the leaf images may be taken at different scale and rotation levels, we propose two improvements in kernel descriptor extraction that makes the kernel descriptor to be robust to scale and rotation. Experiments carried out on a subset of ImageClef 2013 show an important increase in performance compared to the original kernel descriptor and automatic image segmentation.