Leaf Species Classification Based on a Botanical Shape Sub-classifier Strategy

Within the framework of a smartphone-based application, helping people to identify plant species in the wild, a sub-classifier strategy has been introduced. It aims at recognizing the botanical properties of a leaf, relatively to various global and local shape criteria used in flora books. A decision function is applied on these classified shape categories to produce a final decision on the species of the leaf. In this paper, the fusion strategy and its corresponding Random-Forest-based sub-classifiers are described. The results of these algorithms for botanical leaf shape recognition demonstrate that our classification algorithm can achieve good performance on leaf species identification while providing the user with relevant information for educational purposes.