Automatic plant identification via computer vision techniques has been greatly important for a number of professionals, such as environmental protectors, land managers, and foresters. In this paper, we conduct a comparative study on leaf image recognition and propose a novel learning-based leaf image recognition technique via sparse representation (or sparse coding) for automatic plant identification. In our learning-based method, in order to model leaf images, we learn an overcomplete dictionary for sparsely representing the training images of each leaf species. Each dictionary is learned using a set of descriptors extracted from the training images in such a way that each descriptor is represented by linear combination of a small number of dictionary atoms. Moreover, we also implement a general bag-of-words (BoW) model-based recognition system for leaf images, used for comparison. We experimentally compare the two approaches and show unique characteristics of our sparse coding-based framework. As a result, efficient leaf recognition can be achieved on public leaf image dataset based on the two evaluated methods, where the proposed sparse codingbased framework can perform better.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.